Filip > Filip's Quotes

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”
― Emmanuel Kant

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.”
― James Randi

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Mark Twain

“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic

“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.”
― Confucius

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
― H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
― Doug Stanhope

“I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.”
― Voltaire

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“We don’t need the people in Miami to code. We don’t need them to become elite. Or even like the elite. We simply need them to believe in the necessity of our expertise. We need to show what a disaster it would be if I switched places with any of the people at this conference. One of the most dangerous populist ideas—the one proposed by people like Jerry and Judge Rick Tennant—is that politicians don’t need any experience. That guts and common sense are all it takes. I’m the perfect person to disprove that theory. I have some guts. I have some common sense. And I definitely have no experience.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)

“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”
― Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

“It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”
― Stephen Colbert

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
― HEGEL

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The many ... whom one chooses to call the people, are indeed a collection, but only as a multitude, a formless mass, whose movement and action would be elemental, irrational, savage, and terrible."

"Public opinion deserves ... to be esteemed as much as to be despised; to be despised for its concrete consciousness and expression, to be esteemed for its essential fundamental principle, which only shines, more or less dimly, through its concrete expression."

"The definition of the freedom of the press as freedom to say and write what one pleases, is parallel to the one of freedom in general, viz., as freedom to do what one pleases. Such a view belongs to the uneducated crudity and superficiality of naïve thinking."

"In public opinion all is false and true, but to discover the truth in it is the business of the great man. The great man of his time is he who expresses the will and the meaning of that time, and then brings it to completion; he acts according to the inner spirit and essence of his time, which he realizes. And he who does not understand how to despise public opinion, as it makes itself heard here and there, will never accomplish anything great."

"The laws of morality are not accidental, but are essentially Rational. It is the very object of the State that what is essential in the practical activity of men, and in their dispositions, should be duly recognized; that it should have a manifest existence, and maintain its position. It is the absolute interest of Reason that this moral Whole should exist; and herein lies the justification and merit of heroes who have founded states - however rude these may have been."

"Such are all great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit. ... World historical men - the Heroes of an epoch - must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others."

"A World-Historical individual is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower or crush to pieces many an object in its path.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel