Quotes by Philosophers - Page 162

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It requires as much caution to tell the truth as to conceal it.
Baltasar Gracián
To hear how much of a great human being you were — even if you really weren’t — open your ears at your funeral.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
God gives His deepest discernment and sharpest marksmanship to men who aim to expose His truth before an enemy's lies.
Criss Jami
Not all truths hurt. And not all that is hurtful is truthful.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Lies make for pathetic allies.
T.F. Hodge
It is not so much freedom of speech but the right to truth that great men protect.
Criss Jami
The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying.
Arthur Schopenhauer
What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
When the word is heard consult the source, and beware the messenger.
T.F. Hodge
It is more disgraceful for a king to tell lies than anyone else.
Arrian
Men prefer sweet lies to unpleasant truths
Bangambiki Habyarimana
As old lies are laid to rest, new ones sprout from their ashes, as deadly as their ancestors
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Apply the lie detector to everything. You will be amazed at how many lies you will discover. Beware tough, you may discover that you are a lie.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The hard truth is that sometimes we need to lie to ourselves to continue to live
Bangambiki Habyarimana
When you're way too real, fake people be like: "You're a trip. I want somebody with real game (lies).
T.F. Hodge
With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.
Criss Jami
Don't lies in the end put us on the path to truth? And don't my stories, true or false, point to the same conclusion? Don't they have the same meaning? So, what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in either case, they signify what I have been and what I am? One can sometimes see more clearly in a person who is lying than in one who is telling the truth. Like light, truth dazzles. Untruth, on the other hand, is a beautiful dusk that enhances everything.
Albert Camus
This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies
Friedrich Nietzsche
And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.
Hannah Arendt
People tell all kinds of lies to save their skins.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Just because something isn't a lie does not mean that it isn't deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
Criss Jami
The only thing more frustrating than slanderers is those foolish enough to listen to them.
Criss Jami
Last words of his mother to his father: "Keep eternity before the children.
Dallas Willard
Applying parents values back to them allot of the time is like trying to pay back a guy who is a counterfeiter with his own counterfeit bills. "No, your supposed to think this is real money. I know it's not. I'm only pretending this is real money to get away with something. I don't actually want to receive it because I know it's fake money.
Stefan Molyneux
They did the best they could with the knowledge they had." How the fuck did people know that? They didn't have no way of knowing that. Even if they did the best they could with the knowledge they had, why the hell didn't they have better knowledge? I mean, then nobody should ever fail an exam because everyone who Wright's an exam is doing the best they can with the knowledge they have. If I don't study for geography exam then I flunk out. Can I then say wait, just like the people who get a "A" I was doing the best I could with the knowledge I had. That's not an excuse for a 6 year old with a goddamn spelling B. How the hell is it an excuse for parents in full control of a developing human mind?If you don't study for the exam you fucking fail and if you don't study for parenting you fucking fail. You don't get to say that you did the best you could with the knowledge you had. Fuck that. That's a bullshit cop-out. You goddamn will study. It's a little more important raising a child than passing a spelling B when you're 6 goddamn years old. You goddamn will study and if you don't study youre more culpable.
Stefan Molyneux
As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
Rebecca Goldstein
Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed.
Rebecca Goldstein
Increased responsibility for babies and young children has proved just as restrictive, if not more so, than sexism in the home or in the workplace.
Élisabeth Badinter
A virtue is a habit that includes all of these things: actions (you take care of your child even when you don't feel like it), emotions (you are often overtaken by feelings of tenderness and delight), perceptions (you understand your little children better than they understand themselves), choices (you choose to get out of bed and go to the children's room even when you'd much rather not), and thoughts (you think differently, more thoroughly and carefully, about your children than about anyone else in the world). The habit of love includes all these things, but not necessarily all at the same time.
Phillip Cary
The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future
Stefan Molyneux
If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support.
Osho
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Aldous Huxley
If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.
Baron D. Holbach
I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is that we’re actually living on a planet in space. For me that’s an extraordinary thought. It’s mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can’t see the universe for eye liner.
Jostein Gaarder
Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.
Thomas Paine
It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.
Marilyn Frye
And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.
René Descartes
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.
William Paley (paraphrase)
If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
To be enslaved then, you needed to be ignorant. To be enslaved today, you need to be knowledgeable.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A straight face is an ignorant man’s attempt to appear knowledgeable.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
How much man likes or hates a person or a thing is dependent on how much he knows or does not know about the person or the thing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
Celsus
Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.
Peter Sloterdijk
Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say. A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism.
Robert T. Pennock
Politics and Sport were invented to give unknowledgeable people an opportunity to share their knowledge.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.
Voltaire
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
Henry David Thoreau
Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
Henry David Thoreau
The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.
Voltaire
It is never just disagreement but always intellectual dishonesty that is the apologist's worst enemy. And its apprentice is ignorance.
Criss Jami
How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
G.K. Chesterton
It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called 'educated classes' are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light.
Ernst Haeckel
Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before. We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.
Swami Vivekananda
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
Daniel C. Dennett