Quotes by Philosophers - Page 181

A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.
Albert Camus
Every artist takes their final work to the grave.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!
Carl William Brown
A writer is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.
Neel Burton
She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Robert M. Pirsig
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
Iris Murdoch
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
Simone Weil
Make foes of bowmen if you must,Never of penmen.
Thiruvalluvar
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
Blaise Pascal
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w
Susan Sontag
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle
Cornel West
The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.
Cornel West
It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor... the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
Aristotle
If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Mark Fisher
The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust and ill-organised society, and our public charities are but the first tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.
Sri Aurobindo
Peanut butter is a poor man’s marmalade.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There’s a very fine line between being broke and being humble.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Juice is a poor man’s dessert.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty
Ivan Illich
Using money in one’s attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one’s attempt to put an end to xenophobia.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rich people read their bills. Poor people dread theirs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poverty becomes a marvellously beautiful thing when the mindis free of society. One must become poor inwardly for then there isno seeking, no asking, no desire, no - nothing! It is only this inwardpoverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.
Jean de La Bruyère
At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths — and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.
Peter Singer
One additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to the benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I [earning the typical US wage of $28,000 or ‎£18,000 per year]. [I]t's not often you have two options, one of which is a hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beet for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous – next round's on me! But that's effectively the situation we're in all the time. It's like a 99% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.
William MacAskill
Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!
Peter Singer
Leftovers are less tasty if they were left over by someone else, unless you are poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Many a rich man’s bed is bigger than many a poor woman’s bedroom; his bedroom, her house.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you are poor and go without food and clothes, don't hope for wealth in paradise, you are already forsaken
Bangambiki Habyarimana
There are places where you can live only when you are healthy, in those places when you fall ill it's the end of you for most people there can’t afford medical care.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
No doubt we instinctively prefer to help those who are close to us. Few could stand by and watch a child drown; many can ignore the avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India. The question, however, is not what we usually do, but what we ought to do, and it is difficult to see any sound moral justification for the view that distance, or community membership, makes a crucial difference to our obligations.
Peter Singer
First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it. Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad. Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty.
Peter Singer
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know."Zagreus smiled. "You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.
Albert Camus
The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
John Stuart Mill
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not neccessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
Henry David Thoreau
Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty.
Gift Gugu Mona
Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.
Muriel Barbery
Those who would give us equal opportunity for everybody are threatened by it. They are afraid to lose their privileged positions. They pay lip service to it, they act by half measures and do everything to violate the laws they have themselves instituted to make sure the high class is always high. It never changes, it always goes in a circle, when the oppressed fight and get to the top, and they become the new elite and forget the promises.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The poor eats with his eyes, the rich with his mouth.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
The master doesn’t need to chain his slaves; their needs will chain them to him. You can end slavery by the stroke of a pen, but the pressing call of necessity will reestablish it.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Free yourself from mental slavery. Break those invisible chains your masters put on your spiritual neck to control you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco
For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.
Umberto Eco
And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).
Cornel West
In the past 20 years alone, it adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars adn government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves? I believe that if you read this book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts and the ethical arguments, you will agree that we must act.
Peter Singer
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
Peter Singer
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
Henry David Thoreau
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.
Paulo Freire
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
Immanuel Kant
Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
In the midst of darkness, he alone sees the dawn; in the midst of the soundless, he alone hears harmony.
Zhuangzi
Life blackens at the contact of truth.
Paul Valéry