#philosophy

On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is. On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. Values are subjective--but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad and destructive--and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. Tolerance is good and dominance is bad--but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. ↗

— Stephen Hicks

#respect

There is nothing more soul destroying than respectable selfishness ↗

— Stan Almendro

#respect

The blind lead the blind; we will come to sea. ↗

— Sumanth Bharadwaj

#humor #life #love #philosophy #science

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#science #search-for-meaning #science

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. ↗

— René Descartes

#logic #metaphysics #ontology #philosophy #psychology

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#philosophy #science #science

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#science #science

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#objectivism #philosophy #taggart #acting

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. ↗

— Graham Greene

#life #love #philosophy #faith

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. ↗

— Adam Smith

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism