When truth threatens hope it is truth we usually sacrifice, often along with those who search for it. -- Roger Scruton

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

I thought Lenin a narrow-minded bigot... He made my blood run cold. -- Bertrand Russell

There is no great genius without some touch of madness. -- Seneca

Time heals what reason cannot. -- Seneca

I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy... They are too stupid. -- Colin McGinn

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. -- William James

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers. -- Plato

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution. -- Hannah Arendt

[A] clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well... -- Jerome K. Jerome

Anyone who has had a glimpse of the range and subtlety of the thought of Plato or of a Hegel will long ago have despaired of becoming a philosopher. -- Michael Oakeshott

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man. -- Ernest Becker

Persons who find themselves disenchanted with the whole system of situational obligations in society may seek out those places where reverie is likely to be tolerated. -- Erving Goffman

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -- H. L. Mencken

It is fatuous to apologise for the bad behaviour of our ancestors. In fact, it is impossible. -- Mary Warnock

It is...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague. -- C.S. Peirce

'Tis one thing to know virtue, and another to conform the will to it. -- David Hume

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation', which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. -- Erich Fromm

The word 'revolution' is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content. -- Simone Weil

Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A man has to be careful when he visits powerful cities as a foreigner, and induces their most promising young men to forsake the company of others, relatives or acquaintances, older or younger, and consort with him on the grounds that his conversation will improve them. -- Plato

Behaviourism is dead. Even fancy, sophisticated philosophical behaviourism really is dead. And the kind of behaviourism that seeks to impose epistemic constraints on the ontology of psychological theories is especially dead. -- Jerry Fodor

You do pay a price for stating it simply, namely it's easier for the professionals to misunderstand it. -- John Searle

Part of the wish to die may be the wish not to become a burdon to our families... I just want that motive to be recognised as a respectable motive. -- Mary Warnock

If you're doing philosophy at all, if you're engaged in the way that ideas work, then it's a male peculiarity to wish to go right up in the air and go round in circles without relating them to anything else. -- Mary Midgley

The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. -- Henry David Thoreau

One of the strengths of philosophy is that it teaches you what an argument is, what is evidence and what is rhetoric. It is abundantly clear from many of the debates in the media about Iraq, for example, that people have no idea how to argue, and this is dangerous. -- Edward Craig

What the bourgeoisie produces above all is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. -- Karl Marx

We learn from history that we do not learn from history. -- G.W.F. Hegel

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell

Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. -- Karl Marx

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a prime mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. -- Thomas Aquinas

Since we are in the main not sceptics, we might go on and frankly confess to each other the motives for our several faiths. I frankly confess mine - I cannot but think that at bottom they are of an aesthetic and not of a logical sort. -- William James

The Spice Girls? Is it a book? -- Jean Baudrillard

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. -- Simone de Beauvoir

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is a man who has so much as to be out of danger? -- Thomas Huxley

So there is a sense in which ethical knowledge is more solidly founded in our natural constitution than knowledge of science: we acquire it with less effort of will and mental labour, as we acquire language. -- Colin McGinn

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. -- Henri Bergson

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. -- Ayn Rand

The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. -- Randall Jarrell

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. -- Slavoj Žižek

Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, which in others are luxuries merely and in others still are entirely unknown. -- Henry David Thoreau

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions are answered, the problems of our life have not even begun to be touched. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. -- Simone Weil

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom. -- Albert Camus

I'm struck by how little reference is ever made to the terrible things that have happened in the 20th Century. Ethics ought to be rooted in some idea of the way in which human nature can go wrong and produce these disasters. -- Jonathan Glover

The highest good... is to become as like to God as possible. -- Origen

There is always something wrong, if one is straining to make the commonplace incomprehensible. -- C. P. Snow

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. -- John Haldane