Daniel Schotman

“De souvereiniteit kan niet gerepresenteerd worden; om dezelfde reden waarom die zich niet laat vervreemden; zij bestaat in essentie uit de algemene wil en de wil laat zich niet representeren; ofwel die
blijft wat die al was, of dat is niet het geval, daar zit niets tussen. De afgevaardigden van het volk kunnen
daarom niet zijn representanten zijn, zij zijn slechts zijn zaakwaarnemers; er is niets waarover zij vrijelijk kunnen beslissen’. (.....) ‘het Engelse volk denkt vrij te zijn. Maar het vergist zich daar lelijk in. Vrij is het slechts op verkiezingsdag, daarna is het slaaf, niets. En in de zeldzame momenten dat het de vrijheid heeft, maakt het er een zodanig gebruik van dat het verdient die vrijheid te verliezen’. (Quoted by Frank Ankersmit in his Farewell Oration given on April 12th, 2010)”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract & Discourses Jean Jacques Rousseau Jean Jacques Rousseau

“This so called "synoptic view" of philosophy,
holding as it does that philosophy
is also a science, only one of a more general character than the special sciences, has, it seems to me, led to terrible confusion. On the one hand it has given to the philosopher the character of the scientist. He sits in his library, he consults innumerable books, he works at his desk and studies various opinions of many philosophers as a historian would compare his different sources, or as a scientist would do while engaged in some particular pursuit in any special domain of knowledge; he has all the bearing of a scientist and really believes that he is using in some way the scientific method, only doing so on a more general scale. He regards philosophy as a more distinguished and much nobler science than the others, but not as essentially different from them.”
― Moritz Schlick 'The Future of Philosophy in Richard Rorty (ed.) - The Linguistic Turn

“Albert Einstein on Max Planck's 60th Birthday (1918) "The supreme task of the physcist is to search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path leading to these. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of objects of experience." (Quoted by Karl Popper in The Logic Of Scientific Discovery (1934)”
― Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery

“Anksersmit about his way of working : ‘I am always dealing with questions that have been occasioned by previous phases in my development and I use the work of others only insofar as it may be of help to me in this process. But I never have much interest for their work as such; when reading my colleagues, I always ask myself: what can I do with it. So I’m a kind of intellectual plunderer, so to say. That’s also why I am much of a solitary. Not coincidentally did I make Descartes’s motto into my own: ‘bene vixit bene qui latuit’. That’s also why I have never felt compelled to advertise my ideas; I live in my own world and that suits me well enough.”
― Marcin Moskalewicz - Sublime Experience and Politics: Interview with Professor Frank Ankersmit