The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there are a handful insurance companies, there are six or seven information centers. . but if you want a bagel there are 23 flavors. Because you have the illusion of choice!
Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
. . . we must first scrutinize thoroughly anything appearing in our hearts or any saying suggested to us. Has it come purified from the divine and heavenly fire of the Holy Spirit? Or does it lean toward Jewish superstition? Is its surface piety something which has come down from bloated worldly philosophy? We must examine this most carefully, doing as the apostle bids us: 'Do not believe in every spirit, but make sure to find out if spirits are from God' (I Jn. 4:1).
The philosophy of the rich and the poor is this: the rich invest their money and spend what is left. The poor spend their money and invest what is left.
The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.
It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
Without despair, we will share, and the joys of caring will not be erased. What has been, must never end, the joys of caring will not be replace.
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.
Good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled. . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship Earth. . . In a world struggling in violence and dishonesty, the further development of non-violence - not only as a philosophy but as a way of life, as a force on the streets, in the market squares, outside the missile bases, inside the chemical plants and inside the war industry - becomes one of the most urgent priorities.
Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
