modern_philosophy

%
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Intelligence is a moral category.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
There is no love that is not an echo.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The whole is the false.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
He who matures early lives in anticipation.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Normality is death.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
No emancipation without that of society.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
He who integrates is lost.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
  ~ Theodor Adorno
%
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
We are all mediators, translators.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
  ~ Jacques Derrida
%
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Be that self which one truly is.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Don't forget to love yourself.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Once you label me you negate me.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
  ~ Soren Kierkegaard
%
The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
That which is cannot be true.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.
  ~ Herbert Marcuse
%
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.
  ~ Richard Rorty
%
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A confession has to be part of your new life.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The world is independent of my will.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
What can be shown, cannot be said.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A picture is a fact.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The face is the soul of the body.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
Language is a social art.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
To be is to be the value of a variable.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.
  ~  Willard Van Orman Quine
%
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Saints need sinners.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
I owe my solitude to other people.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
 ~ Alan Watts
%
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Top 10
 ~ Albert Camus
%
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
There is no love of life without despair of life.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Integrity has no need of rules.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?
 ~ Albert Camus
%
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
 ~ Albert Camus
%
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We are all special cases.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
 ~ Albert Camus
%
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Commitment is an act, not a word.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Hell is other people.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Top 10
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
We do not judge the people we love.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Life begins on the other side of despair.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Acting is happy agony.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Words are loaded pistols.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Existence precedes and rules essence.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
 ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
%
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Democracy is the road to socialism.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Religion is the opium of the masses.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
In a higher phase of communist society... only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
 ~  Karl Marx
%
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
The state is not abolished, it withers away.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
 ~ Friedrich Engels
%
If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
 ~ Martin Heidegger
%
To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.
 ~ Martin Heidegger
%
The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
To dwell is to garden.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
We name time when we say: every thing has its time. This means: everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Language is the house of the truth of Being.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
When modern physics exerts itself to establish the world's formula, what occurs thereby is this: the being of entities has resolved itself into the method of the totally calculable.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
The possible ranks higher than the actual.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a being.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
True time is four-dimensional.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
Only a god can save us.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.
 ~  Martin Heidegger
%
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
All movements go too far.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
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.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Sin is geographical.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
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
%
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.
 ~  Bertrand Russell
%
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Money is a poor man's credit card.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The medium is the message.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Affluence creates poverty.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Art is anything you can get away with.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Jokes are grievances.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
 ~ Marshall McLuhan
%
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
%
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
We have become makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.
 ~ Karl Popper
%
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Top 10
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
You are born modern, you do not become so.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved - commitment to a scenario.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
~ Jean Baudrillard
%
the wheel is an extension of the foot
the book is an extension of the eye
clothing, an extension of the skin,
electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion...
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
The line, the continuum -this sentence is a great example- became the organizing principle of life. 'As we begin, so shall we go.' 'Rationality' and logic came to depend the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
All words, in every language, are metaphors.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%
Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
~ Marhsall McLuhan
%

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The Universal view melts things into a blur.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
~ Emil Cioran
%
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
~ Emil Cioran
%
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
~ Emil Cioran
%
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
~ Emil Cioran
%
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
~ Emil Cioran
%
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
~ Emil Cioran
%
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
~ Emil Cioran
%
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
~ Emil Cioran
%
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
~ Emil Cioran
%
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
~ Emil Cioran
%
However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
~ Emil Cioran
%
For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
~ Emil Cioran
%
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
~ Emil Cioran
%
I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
~ Emil Cioran
%
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
~ Emil Cioran
%
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
~ Emil Cioran
%
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
~ Emil Cioran
%
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
~ Emil Cioran
%
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
~ Emil Cioran
%
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
~ Emil Cioran
%
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
~ Emil Cioran
%
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
~ Emil Cioran
%
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
~ Emil Cioran
%
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
~ Emil Cioran
%
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
~ Emil Cioran
%
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
~ Emil Cioran
%
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
~ Emil Cioran
%
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
~ Emil Cioran
%
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
~ Emil Cioran
%
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Under each formula lies a corpse.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
~ Emil Cioran
%
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
~ Emil Cioran
%
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
~ Emil Cioran
%
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
~ Emil Cioran
%
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
~ Emil Cioran
%
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.
~ Emil Cioran
%
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
~ Emil Cioran
%
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
~ Emil Cioran
%
You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
~ Emil Cioran
%
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
~ Emil Cioran
%
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
~ Emil Cioran
%
God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
~ Emil Cioran
%
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
~ Emil Cioran
%
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
~ Emil Cioran
%
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
~ Emil Cioran
%
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Word - that invisible dagger.
~ Emil Cioran
%
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
~ Emil Cioran
%
One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
~ Emil Cioran
%