Quotes by Philosophers - Page 2

Not all ‘whites’ are racists. Not all racists are ‘white.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.
John Stuart Mill
Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.
Noam Chomsky
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
Umberto Eco
Smile, even when others do not.Care, even when others will not.Love, even when others could not.Give, even when others cannot.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A star never lets anything dull its sparkle, not even darkness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If our eyes could see everything, every man would see his own faults.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be like a rose; no matter how many thorns you encounter in life, bloom.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Not everyone who has helped or is helping you wanted or wants to help you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For the greater good":the phrase that always precedesthe greatest evil.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The office’ is a cemetery of dreams.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If working-hours were natural, then employed men would only get erections between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. … during the week.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
12% of employees study further to learn more. 88% of employees study further to earn more.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He who makes $25,000 annually through passive income is more enviable than he who earns $100,000 annually through a salary.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A phone call should be a convenience to the caller, not an inconvenience to the called.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No power on earth, if it labours beneath the burden of fear, can possibly be strong enough to survive.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.
Augustine of Hippo
A politician is a man in his natural state
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place.
James Burnham
A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. [Chomsky in an interview with Chris Hedges in 2010]
Chomsky Noam
Works from the soul transcend works from the mind.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species.
Bertrand Russell
When they try to judge you,remember, they themselves are judged.When they try to condemn you,remember, they themselves are condemned.When they try to break you,remember, they themselves are broken.When they try to hurt you,remember, they themselves are hurting.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Some people are bringing the business tricks of scarcity mentality into God's mind. They will tell you that only a few will see God. Why? God's heart is infinitely huge, his arms infinitely large that all of us can have a place in him
Bangambiki Habyarimana
For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.
Slavoj Žižek
When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.
Criss Jami
The energy you bring, positive or negative, dictates your perceptions, receptions and radiations.
T.F. Hodge
Writing is exposing yourself to strangers
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Herbert Spencer
One is not necessarily made self-centered because he is foolish, but one is very often made foolish because he is self-centered.
Criss Jami
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.
Ivan Illich
Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.
Confucius
The more laws and restrictions there are,The poorer people become....The more rules and regulations,The more thieves and robbers.
Lao Tzu
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Bertrand Russell
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Open your mind and let the universe speak to you
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I used to think that size does not count, until I realized that most people either find other people’s faeces more disgusting than a bird’s droppings, or they do not find the latter disgusting at all.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When the word is heard consult the source, and beware the messenger.
T.F. Hodge
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
My heart goes out to some of those rather hostile yet highly intelligent individuals who may see problems really because they have solutions. That hostility is learned in defense; not offense. An often stubborn and prideful world, in its self-destructive, temporary bliss of ignorance, may be violently resistant to the watchful mind.
Criss Jami
You can only manage to convince a person to admit to being wrong, not ignorant, arrogant, or stupid.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You want to be great? Help others achieve their greatness
Bangambiki Habyarimana
I have argued that when we encounter other humans we experience them first as persons, and cannot help but do so. This means that in order to see a human person as an animal or organism we must abstract from the totality of our experience. My suggestion is that we take this fact seriously in understanding the ontology of everyday objects. According to this proposal a “human animal” or “human organism” is not a thing in its own right, but rather a particular perspective we take on ourselves and our lives, one that attends only to our purely biological functions.
Marya Schechtman
Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Ludwig Feuerbach
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
Sure, some of us humans might be angry at a sovereign God about Hell, but know that that is about as meaningful as a few germs being angry at humans about bleach.
Criss Jami
Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.
J.M. Bernstein
To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.
Peter Sloterdijk
Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.
Robert M. Pirsig