Quotes About Hobbes

Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.

Calvin: Dear Santa, before I submit life to your scrutiny, I demand to know who made YOU the matter of my fate?! Who are YOU to question my behavior, HUH??? What gives you the right?! Hobbes: Santa makes the toys, so he gets to decide who to give them to. Calvin: Oh.

See Sean Coyle, "Thomas Hobbes and the Intellectual Origins of Legal Positivism," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 16 (2003), 243–270; Mark Murphy, "Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?," Ethics 105 (1995), 846–873.

06/11/92 Calvin calls the library with a disguised voice. He is looking for vulgar synonyms for body functions. They hang up on him. Calvin tells Hobbes librarians are a sharp bunch.

It is many times with a fraudulent Design that men stick their corrupt Doctrine with the Cloves of other mens Wit.

I had requested all who might find aught meriting censure in my writings, to do me the favor of pointing it out to me, I may state that no objections worthy of remark have been alleged against what I then said on these questions except two, to which I will here briefly reply.

That zero and one were sufficient for logic as well as arithmetic was established by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1679, following the lead given by Thomas Hobbes in his Computation, or Logique of 1656.

Some 300 years earlier, in Leviathan, Hobbes had anticipated precisely such a notion16 with his concept of 'force and fraud': the idea that violence and cunning constitute the primary, indeed the sole, instigators of outcomes. And that the only analgesic for 'continual fear, and the danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' is to be found in the sanctuary of agreement. The formation of alliances with others.

Por otro lado, aquí se inicia el proceso de personificación del Estado que más tarde desarrollará Hobbes: el Estado representa los intereses del todo y, en aras de la preservación de los mismos, emite normas para regular las acciones externas entre los individuos que interactúan socialmente.

It is many times with a fraudulent Design that men stick their corrupt Doctrine with the Cloves of other mens Wit.

Calvin: I'm a genius, but I'm a misunderstood genius. Hobbes: What's misunderstood about you? Calvin: Nobody thinks I'm a genius. Corfu? It's just a poor man's Pensacola.

Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was not murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny;

I had a few comics, but I was by no means a huge aficionado. I was more of a 'Mad Magazine,' 'Calvin & Hobbes' sort of nerd.

In Hobbes' memorable description, life outside society would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.

Desires grow smaller as intelligence expands, growled Le ffaçasé. I want nothing except to find a few undisturbed moments in which to read the work of the immortal Hobbes.

we have a bit of self-interest in relieving the misery of others. One school of modern economic theory, following Hobbes, argues that people give to charities in part because of the pleasure they get from imagining either the relief of those they benefit or their own relief from alleviating their sympathetic distress.

In his eyes Hobbes, who had savaged the Church in Leviathan (1651), was unambiguously wicked, and excluding him was a pleasure. He told his friend Thomas Tyers that he had 'scorned' to quote Hobbes 'because I did not like his principles'.6 Among the texts he did cite, however, was John Bramhall's 1658 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a book now known, if at all, for having been praised by T. S. Eliot. For

Why, then, did Boyle win? Shapin and Schaffer answer that Boyle won because he played the political game much better than Hobbes, and because Hobbes was swimming against the tide of history. They argue that the emergence of a new way of organizing science was an integral part of the emergence of the new social order of Restoration society

It led Smith to agree with Hobbes' phrase "wealth is power" – not because wealth automatically gives its owner political power, but because it gives him or her control of other people's labour.

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.

Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Hobbes's distrust for the individual with his confidence in the altruistic nature of the individual or individuals who will oversee and control the Leviathan. Are not the latter also of flesh and blood? Hobbes seems to be saying that man's nature cannot be trusted but the nature of a ruler or a ruling assembly of men can be trusted. How so?

A closer examination of the facts would have shown that hordes of perfectly free men and women enjoying equal authority, status and access to resources of every kind, including each other's sexuality, have never existed and probably could not have existed. To paraphrase Hobbes, perfect equality, like its concomitant perfect liberty, can only exist when each individual lives alone in a desert, where it is meaningless.