Quotes by Philosophers - Page 294

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.
Ayn Rand
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke
The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...
Paulo Freire
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Thomas Paine
It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.
Mary Wollstonecraft
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Søren Kierkegaard
Liberties aren't given, they are taken.
Aldous Huxley
If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?
Mary Astell
Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.
Noam Chomsky
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
Jean-Paul Sartre
He who is brave is free
Seneca
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
Slavoj Žižek
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell
It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell
Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
Noam Chomsky
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Henry David Thoreau
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Søren Kierkegaard
True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.
Mortimer J. Adler
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in Time.
J.W. Dunne
Be willing for purpose; it pays huge returns on investment. And along the journey, those who dis your willing sacrifice(s) will ponder their own foolishness.
T.F. Hodge
Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Their doubt is your fuel for dreams. You just have to drive.
Criss Jami
Dreams have to be made real, not reality changed into dreams.
Osho
A mystic is one who has dropped all dreams, who has thrown away this mirror of the mind and who looks directly into life, without any medium interfering. Then he sees the eternal progression, then in a single moment he sees all eternity, and in a single atom he can see the whole reflected.
Osho
Don't ignore your dreams, in them your soul is awake and you are your true self.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Dreams, just dreams, it's all illusion
Bangambiki Habyarimana
She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. Ine modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.
G.K. Chesterton
Do not surrender your dreams based on the seasonality, chase them until they become a reality.
Gift Gugu Mona
Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.
Iris Murdoch
But you do just the opposite. You strengthen your thought-waves. You are seized by worthless thoughts and you co-operate with them. You are sitting alone, there is nothing to do and you start thinking of fighting the coming election. The dream begins! Nothing will please you short of reaching the president’s chair. You have become a president in your dream. There are felicitations and you are enjoying them thoroughly! You never stop to think – what kind of stupidity is this! What are you doing? You are just giving energy to worthless fantasies. Your mind is filled with useless illusions of this kind.The constant flow of dreams eats up a large amount of your energy. It is not for free! You purchase it at the cost of your life.If we examine human life in detail, we will find that ninety-nine percent of the life is lost in fruitless dreams like this. Some dream of wealth, others of power, and others of various conquests. What will you gain even if you attain them all?Thought-waves are nothing but dreams. Do not strengthen them. When the dream starts running within, shake yourself and break the dream as quickly as you can.
Osho
Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.
Zhuangzi
Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Life is a dream. We wake up when we die
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.
P.D. Ouspensky
Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.
Elbert Hubbard
Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.
Gaston Bachelard
If nature has taught us anything it is that the impossible is probable
Ilyas Kassam
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valéry
Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.
Lao Tzu
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
Henry David Thoreau
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul.
Albert Camus
War does one good—it teaches people geography.
Will Durant
A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted.
Jonathan Glover
The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai
Jonathan Glover
Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than the people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this casual distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.
Jonathan Glover
The Great Stone at the center of the Somme memorial has this inscription: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The memorial contains 73,077 names, the names of young men who were robbed of life. Note that we often say that they gave their lives, but of course, this is not true; their lives were taken from them. It is not outrageous to consider the carving of their names and the false promise of “evermore” another act of violence.
Nel Noddings
War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.
Heraclitus
One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are (so) ordained.
Heraclitus
The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.
Nel Noddings
For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.
Nel Noddings