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

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.”

“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.”

“If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling.”

Resonant Thoughts

"In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics …"

— Thomas Pynchon

Literature1760–1796

#humor

"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disintereste…"

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Literature1892–1971

#justice

"Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a crimi…"

— Albert Camus

Literature1913–1960

#life

"...what is the constitutional bearing of these stipulations? ...It is perfectly monstrous...It means that we abandon our fiscal independence, together with our free-trade ways; that we subside into th…"

— Henry Campbell-Bannerman

Politics1836–1908

#freedom