Quotes About Materialists

Materialists speak of the power of people in masses—nations, societies, classes, institutions. Idealists speak of the power of individuals, measuring people by the strength of spirit they exude. According to idealists, mind is the fundamental reality—the ground of all being—and everything else is its reflection. Everything in nature is an expression of the universal mind.

To be pedantic about it, no experiment or series of experiments entitles us to make absolute statements about mind and matter. Experiments only entitle us to say, at a date, that one kind of model seems more useful than another kind of model. To go beyond that and believe in a model remains an act of faith; the Christian Scientists recognize their own act of faith, but the Fundamentalist Materialists do not.

Pensar como espiritualistas, agir como materialistas. Não é absurda a doutrina: é, afinal, a doutrina espontânea da humanidade inteira.

The entire dispute between materialists and spiritualists, which became so heated during 1855-56, is merely proof of the unbelievable vulgarity and shameless ignorance to which the learned profession has sunk as a result of the study of Hegelian nonsense and neglect of Kantian philosophy.

From the austere negations of the ancient Indian materialists, to the funereal perambulations of Schopenhauer, pessimism also has its own ontological argument: existence is that beyond which nothing worse can be conceived.

Those who maintain that mind is the reality and matter an evil dream are called idealists—a word which has a different meaning in philosophy from that which it bears in ordinary life. Those who argue that matter is the reality and mind a mere property of protoplasm are called materialists.

Is there anyone who really believes that we could be 'post racial' in a culture that fetishizes black athletes, equates black style with rebelliousness, pillages indigenous belief systems for pithy profundities to satisfy the spiritual cravings of secular materialists, and then depends on cheap immigrant labor, redlining, and mass incarceration to safeguard class hierarchies that are obviously racialized?

If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

We have so many economists in Africa who are idealists rather than materialists. They are full of ideas, but lack the wisdom to make better use of nature. Only industrialization is the remedy for the African problem.

The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte.