Library, page 2

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Albert Einstein · Thinkers beyond philosophy

“Philosophy is to be studied not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.”

Bertrand Russell · Analytic philosophy

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Bertrand Russell · Analytic philosophy

“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”

Karl Popper · Philosophy of science

“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“The concepts of obligation and duty — moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say — and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of 'ought', ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible.”

G. E. M. Anscombe · Analytic philosophy

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”

John Rawls · Political philosophy

“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action.”

bell hooks · Feminist theory

“The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”

bell hooks · Feminist theory

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

bell hooks · Feminist theory

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“Justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility.”

John Stuart Mill · Liberalism

“Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

Hannah Arendt · Political philosophy

“The true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.”

William James · Pragmatism

“Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.”

William James · Pragmatism

“There is grandeur in this view of life.”

Charles Darwin · Thinkers beyond philosophy

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.”

Bertrand Russell · Analytic philosophy

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.”

Bertrand Russell · Analytic philosophy

“The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi · Moral and political thought

“Not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation.”

Karl Popper · Philosophy of science

“The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.”

Karl Popper · Philosophy of science

“Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society.”

John Rawls · Political philosophy

“The guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement.”

John Rawls · Political philosophy

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

William James · Pragmatism

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

Bertrand Russell · Analytic philosophy

“Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi · Moral and political thought

“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”

John Rawls · Political philosophy

“A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

John Dewey · Pragmatism

“Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.”

John Dewey · Pragmatism

“It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.”

G. E. M. Anscombe · Analytic philosophy

“My third thesis is that the differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.”

G. E. M. Anscombe · Analytic philosophy

“I can only choose within the world I can see.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

“In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

“The central concept of morality is the individual thought of as knowable by love.”

Iris Murdoch · Moral philosophy

“Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong.”

Mary Midgley · Moral philosophy

“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature. They are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself.”

Martha Nussbaum · Capabilities approach