Quotes by Philosophers - Page 288

Don't let them tell us stories
Albert Camus
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
Michel Foucault
Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter.
Thomas Paine
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.
Max Weber
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Jean Baudrillard
members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90
Richard M. Rorty
Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
Henry David Thoreau
People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.
Noam Chomsky
A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
John Stuart Mill
Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms.
Allen Ginsberg
This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars—they would think the country has gone insane.
Noam Chomsky
Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.
G.K. Chesterton
Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation
Julia Kristeva
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan
I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.
Friedrich A. Hayek
In conclusion, the arms of others either fall from your back, or they weigh you down, or they bind you fast.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.
G.K. Chesterton
He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled
Aristotle
The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
Max Stirner
He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command
Niccolò Machiavelli
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Workingmen of all countries unite!
Karl Marx
To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.
Frantz Fanon
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.
Noam Chomsky
For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.
Noam Chomsky
The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
Plato
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx
Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.
Frantz Fanon
The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A deep breath is a technique with which we minimize the number of instances where we say what we do not mean … or what we really think.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Our parents would not be ‘The best parents in the world’ (to us) if they were not our parents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is a sign of immaturity to believe that being older than someone (automatically) makes you more (mentally) mature than them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Stolen oranges also have Vitamin C. Likewise, a stolen salmon, too, has omega-3 fatty acids.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some mistakes are worse than others: wearing your underwear inside out isn’t as uncomfortable as wearing it back to front.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every single living thing is food to at least one living thing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You cannot really shame a man who sincerely does not care what others think of him.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When it comes to things such as sugar and rice, most people believe that brown is superior to white. But when it comes to human beings, they believe that the opposite is true.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people respect some people only because some people respect them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Furious and wild with fear, the potatoes flailed the air with their leaves and stamped their roots, but obviously this got them nowhere.
Stanisław Lem
Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.
Neel Burton
Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.
Neel Burton
Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.
Voltaire
Making God a man is the consolation prize that our forefathers gave themselves for not being the ones who were each blessed with a vagina.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some of the people we feel sorry for feel sorry for us for thinking that they are the ones who should be felt sorry for.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Instead of being regarded as intelligent or knowledgeable, many a woman would rather be regarded as beautiful or good in the kitchen; many a man, as handsome or good in bed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To take away a man’s sanity, answer all his prayers and solve all his problems. Or give him everything and everyone he wants.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is as difficult for most poor people to truly believe that they could someday escape poverty as it is for most wealthy people to truly believe that their wealth could someday escape them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If there were something that Mother Nature or God could do with money, She or He would have sold immortality to the rich a long time ago.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana