Quotes by Philosophers - Page 2

The more laws and restrictions there are,The poorer people become....The more rules and regulations,The more thieves and robbers.
Lao Tzu
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'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
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
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
Misguided good men are more dangerous than honest bad men. It is because they are seen as good that, in and by good conscience, the mob will always, stubbornly back them without question.
Criss Jami
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.
Democritus
Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
Karl Marx
Some people's theologies come across as blatantly wrong when weighed against what is revealed in Scripture. However God has mercy on those who may be wrong but genuinely seek understanding before seeking themselves.
Criss Jami
examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.
Gregory B. Sadler
The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
Criss Jami
It's easy to make a mess when you're not the one who has to clean it up.
Criss Jami
Perhaps a seemingly dull, boring person is not a person who lacks personality, but rather a person with so much personality most other things bore them.
Criss Jami
The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.
Criss Jami
Maths is at only one remove from magic.
Neel Burton
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I've finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed
Criss Jami
Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Love's light conquers hate's darkness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Keep negative people in your prayers, not in your life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
f you are too good to look after God’s trash, you are not good enough to look after God’s treasure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Love is the only flame that can light up your soul and universe simultaneously.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.
Henry David Thoreau
Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do...and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.
Criss Jami
Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
Immanuel Kant
When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing
Bangambiki Habyarimana
If you are afraid of the critics you will never write a word
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You can edit what you write. Why not edit what you say? If it hurts somebody, you can still offer an apology or withdraw your statements
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.
Criss Jami
Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.
Criss Jami
The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.
Stefan Molyneux
Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.
Criss Jami
Some skeptics believe religious people are religious because they fear Hell. It's about as fair as saying skeptics are skeptics because they fear the ridicule of modern society.
Criss Jami
But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
G.K. Chesterton
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
Ayn Rand
The greatest wisdom is to be happy
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Valid questions are better than invalid assumptions.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You cannot marry your past without divorcing your future.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't cry over spilt milk when you can milk another cow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Don't pluck a rose's petals and then ask the rose why it is sad.
Matshona Dhliwayo
An ugly diamond is still worth more than a beautiful pebble.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you touch a wound while it is healing, you will prolong it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The quickest way to find honey is to follow bees.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
As long as there is thirst in you, water can quench it; but you can live a kind of life in which you never feel thirsty; do not go in the sun, do no manual work, stay at home and relax and you will not feel the thirst. But then you will find no joy in drinking water. He who toils all day, enjoys the bliss of a good night’s rest. This is ironical: if you want to enjoy the pleasure of a good night’s sleep you have to work like a labourer all day. The trouble is that you want to spend your days like an emperor and your nights like a labourer.
Osho
Some women would not have contracted an STD or STDs had they not been on the pill.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana