philosophy

"There is... something which is in energy only; and there is something which is both in energy and capacity. ...of relatives, one is predicated as according to excess and defect: another according to t…"

"I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless."

"Men's minds are as variant as their faces, and, where the motives of their actions are pure, the operation of the former is no more to be imputed to them as a crime, than the appearance of the latter;…"

"Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it."

"I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. I feel that--don't you?--when I see blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away in ch…"

"Thus the Age of Reason has turned out to be the Age of Structure; a time when, in the absence of purpose, the drive for power as a value in itself has become the principal indicator of social approval…"

"They will not change the words of the creed; they will simply give “new meanings and the highest criticism to-day is that which confesses and avoids. In other words, the churches will change as the pe…"

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."

"By social movements we mean a certain type of organisation of social practices, the logic of whose development contradicts the institutionally dominant social logic"

"In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical inf…"

"Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a differen…"

"As our colonial ancestors felt that a decent regard for the opinions of mankind should impel those in a state of rebellion to declare their reasons, so the suffragettes have repeatedly endeavored to s…"

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry."

"A couple alleged males attempted to sucker punch a 100-pound woman and missed. And they ended up with their faces smashed in and spending the night in the Pima County Jail, where I'm sure — being good…"

"But in a little measure my small voice of individual experience does join in the declaration of philosophy that the good is the only world, and that world is a world of spirit. It is also a universe w…"

"The beings of this world have been evolved. They have all been formed according to the same general plan, and filled with similar susceptibilities. No being or set of beings is so distinctive, or spec…"

"At some point, a theistic coup d’état has eclipsed the godless schools of thought and written them out of the record. The Gītā is a blatant instance, with Krishna imposing his presence as object of de…"

"Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun."

"Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will."

"Giving then to matter all the properties which philosophy knows it has, or all that atheism ascribes to it, and can prove, and even supposing matter to be eternal, it will not account for the system o…"