I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.
Philosophers don't all believe that ethics is just based on intuition. That's just stupid! It's ignoramus!
It's no use trying to talk philosophy to our politicians. And I'm not a moral or political philosopher. I'm not interested in that.
Gary Greenberg is a thoughtful comedian and a cranky philosopher and a humble pest of a reporter, equal parts Woody Allen, Kierkegaard, and Columbo. The Book of Woe is a profound, and profoundly entertaining, riff on malady, power, and truth. This book is for those of us (i.e. all of us) who've ever wondered what it means, and what's at stake, when we try to distinguish the suffering of the ill from the suffering of the human.
I think nobody alive today is a more powerful agent of conversion than someone like Mother Teresa. You can refute arguments but not her life. When she came to the National Prayer Breakfast and lectured President Clinton about abortion, he had nothing to say to her. He can't argue with a saint. It's too bad there isn't an easier way, because becoming a saint is not the easiest thing in the world. It's much easier to become an apologist or a philosopher or a theologian.
Why do I wear tennis shoes? That's two questions. Do I wear tennis shoes? The answer to that question is, "Yes." "Why?" That's a question philosophers have been pondering for centuries.
The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out.
I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.
In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters.
Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.
A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'
Out of Frederic Remington's Sundown Leflare graved on the mantel. Sundown and another mountain man cooked and ate their supper. "Then," says Remington, "they sat down with the greatest philosopher on earth - the fire."
It is generally agreed by philosophers of science that important contributions which have a revolutionary impact on science are often methodologically inadequate, reveal many anomalies, and may indeed be factually erroneous.
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.
The philosopher is Nature's pilot.
Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people - it is often very dangerous to do things at all - and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people.
No philosopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct from leaden instincts.
The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there.
As a philosopher, I have a right to ask for a rational explanation of religious faith.
The doctrine (of) maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy . . . I find myself totally unable to accept . . . . Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.
A philosopher will not believe what he sees because he is too busy speculating about what he does not see.
Economists can be called the worldly philosophers for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of man's activities-his drive for wealth.
Are mathematical ideas invented or discovered? This question has been repeatedly posed by philosophers through the ages and will probably be with us forever.
Aristotle wore many rings and expensive clothes. ... Plato found this off-putting and unsuited for a philosopher.
Plato assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?
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