If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
Abigail Adams
We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.
Alain de Botton
Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Alan Dershowitz
I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?
Alan Moore
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.
Albert Pike
Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.
Alison Gopnik
Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.
Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.
Anne Applebaum
Even as I pursued a doctorate in the history of ideas in my native Denmark, I realized I had neither the encyclopedic training nor the passion for cool logic - not to mention the nerve - to follow in the footsteps of classical liberal philosophers and economists such as Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
Anne Fortier
Please bear in mind that my observations and thoughts are the outcome of my own unaided impulse and curiosity alone; for, besides myself, in our town there be no philosophers who practice this art, so pray, take not amiss my poor pen and the liberty I here take in setting down my random notions.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.
Apollonius of Tyana
The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.
Arthur Young
The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble.
Bernard Williams
A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.
Bertrand Russell
In my office, I have a very beautiful marble bust of Seneca. I always have my eye on him when I'm taking phone calls. He's one of the many philosophers I've always read and admired.
Brunello Cucinelli
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
Bryan Magee
The wall at Le Philosophe is covered with French philosophers, and supposedly, if you are able to name all of them, they will pay for your meal. I was only able to identify Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Descartes and, I think, Foucault. And, I think, Luce Irigaray.
Caterina Fake
You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.
Catherine the Great
Philosophers see no harm in the Jesuits other than in their effect on humanity and the sciences. The vulgar and especially the prejudiced only hate them from an envy and jealousy born out of conspiracy and intrigue at an organisation which overshadows them.
Cesare Beccaria
It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.
I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn't exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.
The American people want to pay attention to serious ideas again. Our founding was built by people who were political philosophers, and we need to get back to that, away from this kind of cheap political rhetoric of Right and Left.
The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations - Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others - were natives of Europe and America.
Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.
Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.
Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.
Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.
I, for one, struggle a little bit with a $250,000 education for a philosophy degree. They are a wonderful people, but we can't employ philosophers in manufacturing in the United States. We need a one- or two-year technical add-on for a high school.
Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.
It's always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists, or anyone else actually has paid to humor.
It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.
Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over the morality of targeted assassinations - a technique that the Israelis use with some frequency - without ever reaching anything approaching consensus.
God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.
I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.
Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.
Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?
