Quotes About Philosophy

Well, I'm a libertarian conservative, so I believe in limited government/maximum individual freedom.

As soon as feeling is regarded as a phase of a physiological process instead of a product of it—namely a new entity metaphysically different from it—the paradox

William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older.

Our conscious experience arises out of the laws of nature, the states of our brain, and our entanglement with the world.

Population thinking is itself a population of mental and public things. Philosophers' discussions of what population thinking really is are members of this population. So is the text you just read, and so is your reading of it.

philosophers are premature ejaculators who decant too soon, spilling their seminal genius to no effect.

Are humans ever really capable of regarding others as ends in themselves?

Science is not a practice so much as an ideology.

Computers are fine, but it's time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains.

It's simply not the case that secular liberalism, grounded in materialist utilitarianism, is the inevitable and default worldview of anyone who isn't stupid, brainwashed, or uneducated;

The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality.

Supposing you knew -- not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition -- that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real -- as real to the mind.

I have known fellows to whom the earth was so full of little pleasures that after the worst clouts they rose like larks from a furrow. A wise philosophy--but I had none of it. I always saw the little pageant of man's life like a child's peep-show beside the dark wastes of eternity.

An unexamined and untested belief system is not faith. It's only an inheritance you have been taught.

Ideas' is right. I hardly do any detailed design anymore, I have people who are better at it than I am. But a craftsman is not necessarily an artist. He needs that something extra that only comes from the cold heart of the universe.

The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.

Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.

As a lifetime proposition, happiness is a discipline, no doubt; but for moments at a time, it's a piece of luck. A piece of luck and a clue: a hint, not just of what might be, but of what already exists, in the heart of a man's heart...

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns von der Gegenwart distanzieren, weshalb wir niemals ganz der Realität der Dinge habhaft werden, machen sie die Vergangenheit zur absoluten Fiktion.

War is fundamental. A man's views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life.

The materialist philosophy says that in a godless world all we need do to overthrow the laws of economics and the limits of human nature is shed enough blood and make enough sacrifices of other innocent people, and the mouths of endless cornucopias will be opened. You cannot make an omelet without a genocide of innocent eggs, and without Walter Duranty to get a Pulitzer for lying his ass off about it.

It will also tell you how easy it is to do just that: simply buy the entire stock market. Then, once you have bought your stocks, get out of the casino and stay out. Just hold the market portfolio forever. And that's what the index fund does. This investment philosophy is not only simple and elegant. The arithmetic on which it is based is irrefutable. But it is not easy to follow its discipline. So

John C. Polkinghorne

No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.