philosophy

"I have recently begun to look for people’s “vicar” nature. It is a technique I happened upon quite by chance, but I think it has a precedent in eastern mysticism. In Buddhism they talk of each of us h…"

"The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal."

"What matters this or that reason? What we want is more of the trade which the Dutch now have."

"Because the scope of the sculptor's subject remains so limited, we must be careful to concentrate as much meaning or emotion as possible in the few forms that remain at our disposal."

"Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardwa…"

"If one thinks that ideological conceptions are an important feature of modern societies, and that the analysis of ideologies will therefore have to be an integral component of any contemporary politic…"

"While birds can fly, only humans can argue. Argument is the affirmation of our being. It is the principal instrument of human intercourse. Without argument the species would perish. As a subtle sugges…"

"The refined simplicity should develop out of the complex. It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around."

"The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning."

"If a society displays less brilliance than an aristocracy, there will also be less wretchedness; pleasures will be less outrageous and wellbeing will be shared by all; the sciences will be on a smalle…"

"Poetry which has decided to do without music, to divorce itself from song, has thrown away much of its reason for being..."

"There was a side of Sloan, she had decided, that she mistrusted, a side that could be summed up by saying that he was a Republican. Up to now this had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans …"

"Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society h…"

"He’s almost certainly planned for the contingency of being caught. He’s rich and he’s got more lawyers than some countries have people."

"When I did well, as a boy you used to put me in prison. Now if I do it being grown up, you will do worse to me."

"On Bush "Free Trade" policies, the Republican Party has signed off on economic treason."

"Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called 'art' or whatever it's called, I went into busi…"

"Before I start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say 'almost' because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor's ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between concep…"

"Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise."

"Thirty percent of Republicans believe the scourge of the Earth is Mexican immigration. What's the reason for why I don't have a job? Well, make, make Mexican immigration the scapegoat for that. I unde…"