Quotes by Philosophers - Page 62

Fear mediocrity,not failure.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.
Noam Chomsky
Today is the best time to do what you couldn't do yesterday, because tomorrow might be too late.
Gift Gugu Mona
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.
Eric Hoffer
The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
Bertrand Russell
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.
G.K. Chesterton
God made me an Atheist
Christopher Zzenn Loren
Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Possibility means "freedom". The measure of freedom enters into the concept of man. That the objective possibilities exist for people not to die of hunder and that people do die of hunger, has its importance, or so one would have thought. But the existence of the objective conditions, of possibilities or of freedom is not yet enough: it is necessary to "know" them, and know how to use them.
Antonio Gramsci
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine, and you have yours; and our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge. Conversation is hardly better than a ping-pong game of opposed opinions, a game in which no one keeps score, no one wins, and everyone is satisfied because he does not lose - that is, he ends up holding the same opinions he started with.
Mortimer J. Adler
A conversation between Adso and William -You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.""And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don't know know why you know that you know what you do?"I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. "Perhaps that's it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.
Umberto Eco
By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.
Mikhail Bakunin
Every time you say it is impossible, you shoot yourself in the foot
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A knife may scar a body, but a careless word will wound a soul.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Following the herd reduces you to a cow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The shepherd's fortune is in his sheep.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ordinary leaders move mounds,good leaders move hills,but great leaders move mountains.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Guide humbly.Guide happily.Guide hopefully.Guide honorably.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Guide impactfully.Guide impressively.Guide intuitively.Guide incredibly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Guide valiantly.Guide venerably.Guide valiantly.Guide virtuously.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Suspense consumes your opponents, whereas mystery intrigues your followers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A general is powerless without an army.An army is directionless without a general.To win battles a general and an army need each other.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Kings struggle to rule over nations,men struggle to rule over themselves;God effortlessly rules the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Leading fools is like leading no one.Following a fool is like following no one.The wise make the best leaders and followers.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You cannot lead those who do not want to follow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
In serving the poor,one serves humanity.In serving mankind,one serves equity.In serving goodness,one serves God.In serving the Creator,one serves himself.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A ruler who is loved is greater than a ruler who is feared.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You cannot lead and follow a herd at the same time.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There are those who will hate you for the wrong reasons; you must be shrewd but innocent around them. There are those who will hate you for the right reasons, you must listen to them.Then there are those who will love you for the wrong reasons, you need them but never listen to them, and those who love you for the right reasons you must always keep near.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When you lead the wise, walk behind them.When you lead the virtuous, walk beside them.When you lead the imprudent, walk in front of them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The greatest leaders are the greatest servants.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Do not hire those who are incapable.Do not fire those who are capable.A small, devoted army is greaterthan a large, indifferent one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you despise your people,you will disregard them.If you hate your people,you will harm them.If you esteem your people,you will serve them.If you love your people,you will even die for them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Lead rationally.Lead responsibly.Lead resiliently.Lead reliably.
Matshona Dhliwayo
What supporters say about their leadertells men a third about who he is.What supporters do for their leadertells men two thirds about who he is.What supporters give up for their leadertells men all of who he is.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Lead competently.Lead productively.Lead skillfully.Lead excellently.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Average leaders take you to the mountain.Superior leaders take you up the mountain.Excellent leaders take you to mountaintop.Transcendent leaders take you to the stars.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.
Slavoj Žižek
A model is an actor without a voice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
All I know: I could only encounter you, my oasis, coming out of a desert. Deserted myself. This is all right. My futureless and solitary self. When suddenly I hear the voice of the springs--Right away you made me want to sing. To cry. Then to drink. But after the desert, the merest trickle of water sounds like a storm. And ever since, Promethea's every murmur shakes my life like an earthquake. I was asleep. I was not thirsty. It would have been possible for me not to hear the first three tears. Ever since I never sleep. I listen.
Hélène Cixous
Writing is the painting of the voice.
Voltaire
The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time.
Bertrand Russell
The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others.
Bertrand Russell
The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land.
Erich Fromm
A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.
Henry David Thoreau
The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.
Bertrand Russell
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.
Henry David Thoreau
To see the farm is to leave it.
Stefan Molyneux
Most politicians would love to lead politically blind people.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Many people take a very low view of politicians, but that is exactly how they conduct their social interactions daily
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
... By disarming, you at once give offense, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you.
Niccolò Machiavelli
... On the whole, the best fortress you can have, is in not being hated by your subjects. If they hate you no fortress will save you...
Niccolò Machiavelli
The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Angels need an assumed body, not for themselves, but on our account.
Thomas Aquinas
And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.
Voltaire
Every visible thing in this world is put in the charge of an Angel.
Augustine of Hippo
Whatever you say or do, remember there's always someone watching you.
Gift Gugu Mona