Quotes on Hobbes

Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.

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.

Calvin: I'm a genius. I can't believe how smart I am. ...I've got more brains than I know what to do with. Hobbes: So I've noticed.

Reality continues to ruin my life.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.

The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

"War," says Machiavelli, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us? Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

Calvin: Do you believe in the Devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man? Hobbes: I'm not sure man needs the help.

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.

The way Calvin's brain is wired, you can almost hear the fuses blowing.

Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.