The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

Sin is geographical.

Religions get lost as people do.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful. If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

There is no wealth but life.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Hoover was a patriot in his heart, but he definitely exceeded his power.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

I’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

That government is best which governs least.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.