Quotes by Philosophers - Page 168

The people naturally adhere most to doctrines which demand the least self-exertion and the least use of their own reason, and which can best accommodate their duties to their inclinations.
Immanuel Kant
A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.
Simone de Beauvoir
And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important... What sex should involve is a very serious relationship. Whether that relationship should or should not become a marriage is a question which depends on the circumstances and the context of the two persons' lives. I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives -- a question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain. When one is certain that one's choice is final, then marriage is, of course, a desirable state. But this does not mean that any relationship based on less than total certainty is improper. I think the question of an affair or a marriage depends on the knowledge and the position of the two persons involved and should be left up to them. Either is moral, provided only that both parties take the relationship seriously and that it is based on values.
Ayn Rand
If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.
Sam Harris
Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The gentleman does not promote people merely on the basis of their words, nor does he reject words merely because of the person who uttered them.
Confucius
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
Albert Camus
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
John Stuart Mill
Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) 'thou shalt not' predominates unduly over 'thou shalt.
John Stuart Mill
We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.
Jonathan Sacks
A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand Russell
All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
Aristotle
What is morality, she asked.Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
Ayn Rand
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Robert Musil
Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.
Marcus Aurelius
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
Aldous Huxley
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural . . to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.
Elbert Hubbard
Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions — the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions—the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form—the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people.Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn’t hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people—but only because he first hates them in himself. And so, in one form or another, the witch hunt goes. We hate people "because," we say, they are dirty, stupid, perverted, immoral.... They might be exactly what we say they are. Or they might not. That is totally irrelevent, however, because we hate them only if we ourselves unknowingly possess the despised traits ascribed to them. We hate them because they are a constant reminder of aspects of ourselves that we are loathe to admit. We are starting to see an important indicator of projection. Those items in the environment (people or things) that strongly affect us instead of just informing us are usually our own projections. Items that bother us, upset us, repulse us, or at the other extreme, attract us, compel us, obsess us—these are usually reflections of the shadow. As an old proverb has it, I looked, and looked, and this I came to see: That what I thought was you and you, Was really me and me.
Ken Wilber
It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think taht we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.
Bertrand Russell
Subject to the law(s) of nature, hate is born to die
T.F. Hodge
Indifference is more truly the opposite of love than hate is, for we can both love and hate the same person at the same time, but we cannot both love and be indifferent to the same person at the same time.
Peter Kreeft
A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.
Don Cupitt
You say you love your wife. You depend on her; she has given you her body, her emotions, her encouragement, a certain feeling of security and well-being. Then she turns away from you; she gets bored or goes off with someone else, and your whole emotional balance is destroyed, and this disturbance, which you don’t like, is called jealousy. There is pain in it, anxiety, hate and violence. So what you are really saying is, ‘As long as you belong to me I love you but the moment you don’t I begin to hate you.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Hate hates what it mirrors or envies.
T.F. Hodge
One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.
Friedrich Nietzsche
They say that people fall in and out of love, but do they, too, fall in hate? Or fall into indifference? It has hindered men for ages the notion that one falls in love rather than decides to truly love, the notion that his lack of control, on the B-side, can also make him fall in hate or indifference without the responsibility to help it or control it.
Criss Jami
You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.
Nikos Kazantzakis
It's fallacious reasoning for the atheist to hate all religion due to men who manipulate religion to fit their own agendas. They are counterparts, therefore, if Truth is true, partners in crime. To believers, the atheist and the religiously corrupt boil down to the same person, the self-righteous: one denies Truth to fit his own agenda; the other manipulates Truth to fit his own agenda.
Criss Jami
Dictators long ago found that it is easier to unite people in common hatred than in common love.
Dagobert D. Runes
We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.
Umberto Eco
A coward's gun is emptied when fear pulls the trigger, and hate is the ammunition of choice.
T.F. Hodge
Promoting what you don't like, invites more of it to your doorstep. Beat the right drum. ~T.F. Hodge
T.F. Hodge
Chances are that there are white people who brag about being the first to move out of a suburb that has been intruded by blacks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For what religion has never had sects? Rest assured, Extremism is always the derrière.
Criss Jami
There is noroom for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a privateego. Be empty in order to be filled. ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; andhe that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
Ayn Rand
Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.
Baruch Spinoza
I am usually able to tolerate all kinds of victims of indoctrination except those who have been infected with xenophobia, racism, or homophobia.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior
Friedrich Nietzsche
We hate people who honestly tell us what they think about us. We wish we were what we are not
Bangambiki Habyarimana
They hate you not because of what you have done but because of who you are; you are different from who they are, and you are occupying the ground they want for themselves.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Real love does not hurt, but the rotten lies about love can cause you to hate love.
Gift Gugu Mona
Club Hate' does not admit fine people to it's membership.
T.F. Hodge
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
Emil M. Cioran
Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love—or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The hated man is the result of his hater's pride rather than his hater's conscience.
Criss Jami
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
Erich Fromm
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.
G.K. Chesterton
The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.
Bertrand Russell
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.
Plato
To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A tapping foot isn’t the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana