philosophy

"If I become so convinced that ‘I’m always right,’ the logical conclusion of that often ends up being great cruelty and great violence."

"It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philoso…"

"I had been virtually a Unitarian but without knowing it. The experience of being among Unitarians who did know what they were, and attached much importance to it, was entirely novel to me, but I soon …"

"For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible temptation. It is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If there is a difference between a Socratic daemon and a diaboli…"

"You are in constant danger of being destroyed."

"The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable."

"It seems as though a new epoch were in preparation, a truly human epoch, and as though the end had almost come of those evolutionary periods which sum up the history of the heroic struggles of humanit…"

"I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not--being, in point of fact, Jeeves."

"Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people. For this reason democracy is a doctrine of social criticism."

"I suggest, then... that the first step was an advance under favor of peculiar conditions, from the simplest forms of being, to the next more complicated, and this through the medium of the ordinary pr…"

"Reason crushed that idiocy instantly."

"I hate guns. I can use them, but I don’t like being around them; they add this terrible random-act-of-no-god-at-all angle to any fight. Bang, you’re dead, even if you weren’t the person the shooter wa…"

"I have taken pains to make my distinction of icons, indices, and tokens clear, in order to enunciate this proposition: in a perfect system of logical notation signs of these several kinds must all be …"

"He who thinks he can have flesh and bones without being subject to any external influence, or any accidents of matter, unconsciously wishes to reconcile two opposites, viz., to be at the same time sub…"

"All very unreasonable, but Arthur Gammet was beginning to suspect that most wizards were unreasonable people."

"Every human being has something, a spiritual element, that makes them want to do better, to reach higher."

"We need a welfare state of some sort for efficiency reasons, and would continue to do so even if all distributional problems were solved."

"When you improve the people's economic well-being, it will lead to higher wage increases and higher purchasing power, which will lead to better economic growth. This is a self-fulfilling and virtuous …"

"It’s a combination of things that are happening now, Amy, that make it clear to more and more members of Congress that you can’t keep a straight face on all of this incredible indebtedness, talk about…"

"Although perhaps disproportionately influential, these egalitarian pluralist antiphysicalists still form only a small minority among contemporary philosophers, and today a huge preponderance of curren…"