philosophy

"Everything purposeful is meaningless, and everything meaningful is purposeless."

"It is the duty of all troops and police in my command to adopt the severest measures. Every act of violence committed by partisans must be punished immediately. Reports submitted must also give detail…"

"Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Senator Obama."

"The inhabitants of the earth are bound to each other by the ties and obligations of a common kinship. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree, but not in kind, from the beings …"

"Political philosophy was concerned with the best or just order of society which is by nature best or just everywhere or always, while politics is concerned with the being and well-being of this or tha…"

"Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance."

"The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact — constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color."

"In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig described the risk of pressing reason to its furthest reaches, where it turns back on itself. "In the high country of the mind," he observed…"

"For two things both to believe that snow is white, they need not to be physically similar in any specifiable way, but they must both be in a "functional" condition or state specifiable in the most fun…"

"I actually used them three times, throwing them away in shame before use two times. It is for these offenses that I confessed being immoral and deceitful."

"It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresne…"

"Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste."

"Globalization is the economic treason that dare not speak it name."

"The next point to which I turned my attention was the frequency with which the several numbers themselves occurred. ...Each number might be expected to have occurred either 447 or 448 times. ... I fou…"

"For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer …"

"Unhappiness makes people vulnerable, incessant suffering unjust. Just as in the relations between a creditor and a debtor there is always an element of the disagreeable that can never be overcome, for…"

"That logic, as a science, is susceptible of very wide applications is admitted; but it is equally certain that its ultimate forms and processes are mathematical."

"Stop being who you were and become who you are."

"Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of …"

"Now I share the basic philosophy of Abraham Lincoln when he said that the purpose of government is to enable the people to do together through the instruments of government what they are unable to do …"