Quotes on Philosophy

The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.

Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What's there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's in charge here? Who's the author? That's what we really long to know.

Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.