Quotes by Philosophers - Page 287

There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. The way he talks about himself; if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of the in The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that. - Sam Harris
Sam Harris
The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonised societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole.
Jean-Paul Sarte
No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind
Karl Marx
In plain English, you need to wrestle the doubts and accusations that it’s all just bullshit. And, needless to say, the majority of the work of the triple-H population is undeniably so. The reason that it’s so valuable to society is just that some of it isn’t bullshit and even a small percentage of genuine innovations of software, culture or lifestyle can have a huge impact. Still, you never quite know if you are the bullshitter or the hero, or if you are being sold utter bullshit.
Hanzi Freinacht
Let’s return to the main argument. People are hurting as hell. It matters. We should do something to make them happier, if we can.
Hanzi Freinacht
We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to collapse into a heap of atrocities.
Hanzi Freinacht
we see that an aspect of the work of the masses consists in investigating and opening up the question of names
Sylvain Lazarus
Political success in Athens seemed to depend on having a party, and there seemed now to be no party with whom an honorable man could connect himself.
Irwin Edman
The greatest thieves are not caught. Not because it’s not known that they are thieves but because you cannot accuse them of robbery and live. These thieves are praised as national heroes and liberators or as successful entrepreneurs.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
G.K. Chesterton
Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times—letting pass infinite other examples—a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated—indeed they are so much shunned by everyone in every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us—I can do no other than marvel and grieve… From this it arises that the infinite number who read [the histories] take pleasure in hearing of the variety of accidents contained within them without thinking of imitating them, judging that imitation is not only difficult but impossible—as if heaven, sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity. Wishing, therefore, to turn men from this error, I have judged it necessary to write on all those books of Titus Livy...
Niccolò Machiavelli
My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.
G.K. Chesterton
A prince ought to have two fears one from within on account of his subjects the other from without on account of external powers. From the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies and if he is well armed he will have good friends and affairs will always remain quiet within when they are quiet without unless they should have been already disturbed by conspiracy and even should affairs outside be disturbed if he has carried out his preparations and has lived as I have said as long as he does not despair he will resist every attack.
Niccolò Machiavelli
And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.
Thomas Paine
But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and band, the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.
Thomas Paine
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked.
Nina Power
There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.
Noam Chomsky
...no one should marvel at the ease with which Alexander [the Great] kept possession of Asia, or at the difficulties which others, like Pyrrhus and many more, had in preserving their conquests. The difference does not arise from the greater or lesser ability of the conqueror, but from dissimilarities in the conquered lands.
Niccolò Machiavelli
There are many who think a wise prince ought, when he has the chance, to foment astutely some enmity, so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics.
Vladimir Odoyevsky
What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.
Charles Taylor
A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine.
Eric Voegelin
That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Eric Hoffer
It is politics to please and hoodwink thoseWho flatter but despise us.
Thiruvalluvar
In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.
Thomas Paine
If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Those who believe that where great personages are concerned new favors cause old injuries to be forgotten deceive themselves.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.
Niccolò Machiavelli
I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.
G.K. Chesterton
Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
G.K. Chesterton
Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.
G.K. Chesterton
ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? …At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal.
G.K. Chesterton
He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
A thinking man never be a party man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.
Eric Hoffer
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.
Eric Hoffer
Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.
Gary Gutting
From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility.
György Lukács
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
Plato
On the 'Celestial Seasonings' green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: 'Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By taming free radicals, antioxidants help the body maintain its natural health.' Mutatis mutandis, is not the notion of totalitarianism one of the main ideological antioxidants, whose function throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health?
Slavoj Žižek
Only he who has no use for the empire is fit to be entrusted with it.
Zhuangzi
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.
Albert Camus
Truth brought to public light recruits the best of us to work for change. On the other hand, even the best-intentioned "noble lie" ultimately discredits the finest of causes.
Christina Hoff Sommers
The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.
Raoul Vaneigem
Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul
Ralph Waldo Emerson
These opportunities, then, gave these men the chance they needed, and their great abilities made them recognize it.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.
Noam Chomsky
All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.
Şeyla Benhabib
The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion.
Noam Chomsky
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
David Hume
He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself, for he brings such a power into being either by design or by force, and both of these elements are suspects to the one whom he has made powerful.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
Hannah Arendt