Political Philosophy

Quotes & Thinkers in Political Philosophy

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🇺🇸Henry David Thoreau

Literature

Western philosophy

1817–1862

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.."

"The life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

"“New friends, however, will not be the same.” No, nor will you yourself remain the same; you change with every day and every hour."

"Foucault Quotes of the month, at Queensland University of Technology"

"When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers."

"If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress."

"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."

"Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence."

"A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means."

"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."

"The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege."

"Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness."

"All meaning is necessarily teleological in character and historically rooted in the concrete operations of human subjects."

"To understand the complicated political ideas and movements of the present, then, we must understand the contexts in which they have taken shape, and that requires understanding something of the past, of history."

"Both the unlimited state and the unrestrained market have destroyed civil society, which is our world. … Civil society is something that is not the state or the market. Civil society is the world of you and I."

"While speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific discourse on ideology."

18 quotes

🇫🇷Alexandre Kojève

Philosophy

continental philosophy

"Liberty is the absence of coercion by other human beings."

"Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters."

"So is there no kind of life more wicked than that of mercenary Souldiers, who without any respect had to the equity of the Cause, fight only for plunder and pay."

"Are there quantitative aspects to the phenomena of war that can be counted? Evidently!"

"Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard."

"It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round."

27 quotes

🇫🇷Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1709–1751

"Let us... take in our hands the staff of experience... To be blind and to think that one can do without this staff is the worst kind of blindness."

28 quotes

🇪🇸Joxe Azurmendi

Literature

continental philosophy

1941–2025

"The Basques are Argonauts with very fragile ships."

2 quotes

Adam Ferguson

Literature

Scottish Enlightenment

1723–1816

"The attainments of the parent do not descend in the blood of his children, nor is the progress of man to be considered as a physical mutation of the species."

11 quotes