Francis Bacon
"Knowledge is power."
[Meditationes Sacrae]
Francis Bacon
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
[Novum Organum, Aphorism 129]
Jeremy Bentham
"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."
[Works]
George Berkeley
"All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind."
[Principles of Human Knowledge]
Edmund Burke
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
[Attributed]
Rene Descartes
"I think, therefore I am (Cogito, ergo Sum)."
[Le Discours de la Methode, IV]
Heraclitus
"Nothing endures but change."
[From Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk. IX, sec. 8]
Heraclitus
"You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."
[On the Universe, fragment 41]
Heraclitus
"Everything flows and nothing stays."
[Quoted in Plato's Cratylus]
Thomas Hobbes
"[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
[Leviathan, pt. 1, ch. 13]
David Hume
"'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
[A Treatise on Human Nature]
Immanuel Kant
"There is...only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law"
[Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals]
Immanuel Kant
"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only."
[Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics]
Lao Tzu
"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."
[The Way of Lao-Tzu, 64]
Niccolo Machiavelli
"It is better to be feared than loved, more prudent to be cruel than compassionate."
[The Prince]
Karl Marx
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
[A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right]
Isaac Newton
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
[Letter to Robert Hooke]
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality - in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality besides which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible."
[Beyond Good and Evil]
William of Occam
"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
[Quodlibeta Septem]
Blaise Pascal
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."
[Pensees]
Plato
"We agree that what is holy is loved by the Gods because it is holy, and not holy because it is loved by the gods."
[Euthyphro]
Plato
"Behold! Human beings living in an underground den... Like ourselves... They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave."
[The Republic, bk. VII, 515-B]
Protagoras
"There are two sides to every question."
[Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers]
Protagoras
"Man is the measure of all things: of those which are, that they are; of those which are not, that they are not."
[Quoted in Plato's Theaetetus]
Jean Jacques Rousseau
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
[The Social Contract, I, ch. 1.]
George Santayana
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
[Reason in Common Sense]
Adam Smith
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages."
[The Wealth of Nations]
Socrates
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
[Apology (Plato)]
Socrates
"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
[From Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk. II, sec. 32]
Benedict Spinoza
"Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow."
[Ethics, pt. I, proposition 36]
Benedict Spinoza
"Nature abhors a vacuum."
[Ethics]
Thales Miletus
"Know thyself."
[Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers]
Voltaire
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
[Attributed to Voltaire]
Ludwig Wittgenstein
"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]
