I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts.”
-- Jeremy Bentham (Anarchical Fallacies) - “The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther) - “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
-- John Haldane (Possible Worlds) - “The New Right is even more undisciplined than the liberal middle classes, which have redefined personal freedom as the privilege not to give of themselves when it comes to protecting or advancing the public good. Throughout the West they have gradually withdrawn from public life, claiming that politics is too damaging to their private lives. These lives tend now to be devoted to careerism, travel, holidays, sport, exercise and the caressing of a private state of mind which might be described as an obsession with their personal well-being. For both the New Right and the middle-class liberals, individualism has come to mean self-indulgence.”
-- John Ralston Saul (Voltaire's Bastards) - “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”
-- John Stuart Mill - “The people who earn the most money are never those who advance the frontiers of knowledge or extend the reach of the sympathetic imagination. With surprisingly few exceptions the highest fees are paid to the people who deal in the commodity of money.”
-- Lewis Lapham (Money and Class in America) - “To the extent that the delight in money becomes a transcendent faith, the converts to "the world's leading religion" imagine that money stands as surrogate for all the other denominations of human currency--for love, work, art, play and thought.”
-- Lewis Lapham (Money and Class in America) - “America is Rome reincarnate. Like the Roman empire, the American empire is vastly powerful and unfathomably corrupt. Like Rome, America imposes her civilisation upon an ungrateful world. Like Rome, America needs bread, circuses and philosopher-statesmen to forestall and yet to hasten her demise.”
-- Lou Marinoff (The Philosophers' Magazine, Summer 1998) - “The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts.”
-- Max Weber (Science as a Vocation) - “I've always regarded Nietzsche as a laughable poseur with a philosophy of the extreme, who talked the talk but never walked the walk. The value of his cartoon philosophy was properly summed up by its employment in the title credits for the film 'Conan the Barbarian'.”
-- Peter Beaumont (The Observer, 20/01/02) - “We must not underestimate the size of the market...for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.”
-- Peter Medawar (Review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man) - “Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (Conduct of Life) - “Our gardens are symbols of home rather than seduction. Young people with fire in their blood are seldom found in them. The garden is the scene of middle age, of the slow passage from sexual excitement to domestic routine.”
-- Roger Scruton (Financial Times, 26/05/01) - “What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.”
-- Simone Weil (The Need for Roots) - “Nothing makes me sadder than the peer pressure that enforces conformity and erases wonder...Countless others had the light of intellectual wonder extinguished because a thoughtless and swaggering fellow student called them nerds on the playground.”
-- Stephen Jay Gould (Bully for Brontosaurus) - “Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate...Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic...Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work.”
-- Terry Eagleton (The Guardian 22 Feb. 2003) - “Modern art touches a sore spot, or several sore spots, in the ordinary citizen of which he is totally unaware. The more irritated he becomes at modern art the more he betrays the fact that he himself, and his civilization, are implicated in what the artist shows him.”
-- William Barrett (Irrational Man) - “It is a great art to saunter. The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”
-- Henry David Thoreau - “On a long journey even a straw weighs heavy.”
-- Spanish proverb - “Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”
-- John Muir - “Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt to enjoy them.”
-- G.K. Chesterton - “The real fun of traveling can only be got by one who is content to go as a comparatively poor man....it is not money which travel demands so much as leisure, and anyone with a small, fixed income can travel all the time.”
-- Frank Tatchell - “Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less.”
-- Samuel Johnson - “I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned sure by those who trudge on foot.”
-- Robert Luis Stevenson