"Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism?"

Simon Blackburn Philosophy See all quotes by Simon Blackburn →

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“In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.”

“But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes.”

“Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?”

“Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.”

“Chance is as relentless as necessity.”

“Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying "Hate if you Love Jesus", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to elevate this power is the only way to counteract this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of that po…"

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

Philosophy1767–1835

#freedom

"It's always been hard for me to understand how we say people who supports Osama Bin Laden or someone else like him – who are willing to give their lives to destroy the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – h…"

— Michael Scheuer

Education1952

#freedom

"For thirty years the Cubans fought alone for their independence; thirty years of struggle that strengthened our love for freedom and independence."

— Fidel Castro

Politics1926–2016

#freedom

"My father had a very simple, clear and quite definite view on the aim of human life. He told me many times in my youth that the fundamental striving of every man should be to create for himself an inn…"

— G. I. Gurdjieff

Philosophy

#family