philosophical quotes

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.

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Compromise and tolerance are magic words. It took me 40 years to become philosophical.

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One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

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With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

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Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

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Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

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To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle, to me it is allegro con brio.

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First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

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Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

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Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

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If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

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One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

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Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

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Classical philosophical theism maintained the ontological distinction between God and creative world that is necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.

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My objection to Liberalism is this that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind namely, politics of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.

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Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

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[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

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It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.

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To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

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You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

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I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.

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There are philosophical issues involved in that about choosing the right discount rate, the value, the future, and things like that which drive it. But its start with the premise that global warming is real and if you're a denier of that fact, then you're not going to find climate change mitigation policies to have particular appeal.

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A country's strategy is always based on a fundamental philosophical outlook.

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Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

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Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.

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In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.

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Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

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Were knowledge all, what were our need To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

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Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

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War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

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Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously

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They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings. It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on

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All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

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It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

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And what sort of philosophical doctrine is thi - that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others.

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It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

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I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, make me less of an American.

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I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.

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I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.

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Anyhow, a philosophical turn of thought now was not amiss, else one's patience would have given out almost at the harbour entrance. The term of her probation was eight days.

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Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?

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There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.

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Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.

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With all the weird surroundings of outer space the basic underlying theme of the show is a philosophical approach to man's relationship to woman. There are both sexes in the crew, in fact, the first officer is a woman.

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Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen.

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The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.

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You know how much I am inclined to explain all disputes among philosophical schools as merely verbal disputes or at least to derive them originally from verbal disputes.

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You get to say, 'Here's my philosophical idea about what the costume should like,' and the costume designer comes and gives you choices and sometimes they're all good, and I say, 'What do you think?' and they pick the right thing.

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In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.

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I feel lucky, happy and philosophical about it all.

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The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

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Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

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To philosophical materialists God is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea.

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Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.

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It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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I think he's much funnier in many ways than some of the things that I've done. Because it's a little bit more layered. He's constantly trying to teach Luke what he thinks are really deep philosophical ideas, but they're really simple.

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It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly.

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