philosophy

"I would love to be able to be the one that made peace with Israel and the Palestinians. I would love that, that would be such a great achievement. Because nobody's been able to do it. ... I've had a l…"

"Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack…"

"Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Spinoza"

"We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces."

"God is being repaired."

"Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it..."

"In like manner, as the statement is false "that the Hebrews, being Egyptians, dated the commencement from the time of their rebellion," so also is this, "that in the days of Jesus others who were Jews…"

"I would by no means attempt to infer from hence, that the longitude found by observations of this sort may in all cases be depended upon within one degree; but I beg leave to observe, that whatever ex…"

"It is not unreasonable to assume that the works of God, their existence and preceding non-existence, are the result of His wisdom, but we are unable to understand many of the ways of His Wisdom in His…"

"The attempt to avoid a direct affirmation about infinite parallel straight lines caused Euclid to phrase the parallel axiom in a rather complicated way. He realized that, so worded, this axiom lacked …"

"I realized after I'd been at MIT for a while that I had never even known the semantics of the word "engineering". You see, all my relatives and contacts were medical doctors or biology and chemistry p…"

"The family unit is man's noblest device for being bored."

"We come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy; whiskey and action are easier."

"I cannot see why it is necessary that every deduction from algebra should be bound to certain conventions incident to an earlier stage of mathematical learning, even supposing them to have been consis…"

"He was not for that moment a human being, but a frenzied creature possessed by rage, turned into an animal. All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it will always be, the mo…"

"Cleanthes, a Stoic, subdivided the three divisions, and made six: Dialectic and Rhetoric, comprised in Logic; Ethic and Politic; Physic and Theology. This division was merely for practical use, for al…"

"Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them."

"Reason nevertheless prevails in world history."

"Why can't everybody just get along? No reasonably detached person goes to Israel without being reduced in philosophical discourse to the level of Rodney King—or, for that matter, to the level of Georg…"

"as you probably have done, that no reasonable hope of success is to be entertained in that quarter."