The state is the march of God through the world. -- G.W.F. Hegel

Most of the questions which preoccupy professional philosophers are only an elevated or technical version of the kind of question which any sentient human being asks himself or herself while burning the toast. -- Tom Stoppard

It's strange that people don't recognise the enormous decline in taste in melody, rhythm, harmony and invention since the days of Elvis, Chuck Berry and The Beatles. -- Roger Scruton

...Mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. -- Edmund Way Teale

Man is a social animal. -- Benedict Spinoza

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. -- Giambattista Vico

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy. -- Herbert Spencer

Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just ain't in the head! -- Hilary Putnam

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

The unexamined life is not worth living. -- Socrates

Any lore that widens people's horizons and presents food for thought is the beginning of philosophy. -- Chief Reuben O. Ogunyemi

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. -- Marquis de Sade

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content. -- John Searle

I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. -- John Dewey

For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility. -- David Hume

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways -- I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows. -- Socrates

My goal is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. -- Sam Harris

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. -- John Stuart Mill

Pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others. -- George Eliot

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

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents. -- George Orwell

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. -- Noam Chomsky

The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure annihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being. -- Sartre

In history, in social life, nothing is fixed, rigid or definitive. And nothing ever will be. -- Antonio Gramsci

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

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

If Sartre made one mistake, I think it was not to produce a catchphrase. -- Miles Kington

Socrates said, 'Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live'. -- Plutarch

I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot - in fact hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see. -- Winston Churchill

What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience? -- Adam Smith

Shouldn't I join the ranks of academic philosophers & merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn't I stop trying to do some & keeping my head down? Indeed not. -- Kevin Warwick

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. -- Charles Darwin

Bertrand Russell was giving a lesson on solipsism to a lay audience, and a woman got up and said she was delighted to hear Bertrand Russell say he was a solipsist; she was one too, and she wished there were more of us. -- W. H. Thorpe

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty. -- Jeremy Bentham

"I have done that", says my memory. "I cannot have done that", says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually - memory yields. -- Nietzsche

It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other. -- Aldous Huxley

I really ought to put right away from me the temptation which is brought by the power to give pain. -- Vera Brittain

The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. -- John Stuart Mill

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes. -- Paul Feyerabend

Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies. [On his death bed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan. Attributed.] -- Francois Voltaire

I've always regarded Nietzsche as a laughable poseur with a philosophy of the extreme, who talked the talk but never walked the walk. -- Peter Beaumont

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less. -- Socrates

Women are not, strictly speaking, a class and their dispersion in several classes makes their political struggle and their demands sometimes contradictory. -- Luce Irigaray

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. -- Daniel Dennett

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

By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension. -- Charles Cooley

Hume seems to me to have been the only one of the great philosophers who wanted to get at the truth. The rest all wanted to get at something else...something that would suit their prejudices. -- Bertrand Russell