All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.”

“In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?”

“Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.”

“This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.”

“By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.”

“If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert”

“Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.”

“Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.”

“Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him”

“Every country has the government it deserves.”

“No one species shall make the life of the world its own.’ … That’s one expression of the law. Here’s another: ‘The world was not made for any one species.”

“Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.”

“Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.”

“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.”

“A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he’s often sure he can find one. And that’s a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.”