Philosophy Quotes

"History is the prediction of the present. Historians explain why things turned out the way they did. Since we already know the outcome, this might seem a simple matter of looking back and connecting the dots. But there is a problem: too many dots. Even the dots have dots. Predicting the present is nearly as hard as predicting the future."

- Louis Menand

"Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!"

- Richard Feynman

"I don't know how man will fight World War III, but I do know how they will fight World War IV; with sticks and stones."

- Albert Einstein

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

- Albert Einstein

"The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ..."

- Leon Lederman

"Science as something already in existence, already completed, is the most objective, most impersonal thing that we humans know. Science as something coming into being, as a goal, however, is just as subjectively, psychologically conditioned, as all other human endeavors."

- Albert Einstein

"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."

- Harry S. Truman, 1952

"For the theoretical physicist, sunrise is not a physical observable."

- Hans Bethe

"There is only one map to the journey of life and it lives within your heart."

- Willie Nelson

"My idea of a perfect government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke."

- Ron Swanson

"History began on July 4, 1776. Everything that happened before that was a mistake."

- Ron Swanson

"I think that all government is a waster of taxpayer money. My dream is to have the park system privatized and run entirely by for-profit corporations, like Chuck E. Cheese."

- Ron Swanson

"Death is just another path. One that we all must take."

- Gandalf

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"Invisible things are the only realities."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."

- Edgar Allan Poe

"We are eternal"

- Spinoza

"What is work and what is not work are questions that perplex the wisest of men."

- Bhagavad Gita

"Dance is the timeless interpretation of life."

- Shah Asad Rizvi

"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare."

- Sun Tzu

"The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected."

- Sun Tzu

"The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

"π and e are all the irrationality that I need."

"Q: Why can't you trust an atom? A: Because they make up everything."

"Molecule 1: I just lost an electron. Molecule 2: Are you sure? Molecule 1: I’m positive."