ORNERY QUOTES BY GREAT THINKERS

On Truth and Philosophy

Of what use is a philosopher who hurts no one's feelings?
        attributed to Diogenes of Sinope (5th Century BCE)

Convictions are more hazardous enemies of truth than lies.
        Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); Beyond Good and Evil

[T]he truth itself, and the truth alone, lays bare the secrets of Nature, however mankind may tremble before these revelations.  Philosophy must never shrink from speaking out.
        Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814); Juliette

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction.
        Bertrand Russell (1872-1970); "On the Value of Skepticism"

[A]ll fanatical creeds do harm.  This is obvious when they have to compete with other factions, since in that case they promote hatred and strife.  But it is true even when only one fanatical creed is in the field.  It cannot allow free inquiry, since this might shake its hold.  It must oppose intellectual progress.
        Bertrand Russell; The Impact of Science on Society

All philosophy can do is to destroy idols.  And that means not making any new ones...
        Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951); from his notebooks

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity.  For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.
        Friedrich Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil

The unexamined life is not worth living.
        attributed to Socrates (c.470-399 BCE)

The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; what matters is to change it.
        Karl Marx (1818-83); "Theses on Feuerbach"

There is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs.  And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still seated on our own rump.
        Michel de Montaigne (1533-92); Essays

Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability. ... For it is natural for man to believe true what he desires to be true, and to believe it because he desires it.
        Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860); "On Psychology"

I'm a radical because I want my world to make sense.  I'm a radical because I'm a philosopher.
        James L. Marsh; "Marxism as Philosophy and Philosophy as Marxist"

The errors of great men are worth honoring because they are more fruitful then the truths of small men.
        Friedrich Nietzsche; "On Schopenhauer"

Beginning as subjectivists, distrustful of their own ability to have firm opinions, the sectarian adopts unquestioningly the beliefs of an individual leader, or of a group, and then turns dogmatist, refusing to accept any questions about the newfound creed.  Tireless in defense of the dogma, they betray their sectarianism by the heat with which the dogma, even at its most outlandish, is defended.  The beliefs alone could not generate such emotion.  In truth it is the substitute self that is feeling threatened.  To surrender the dogma is to return to the awareness of the uncertainties of fragmentation.
        Richard Schmitt (1927-); Alienation and Class

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy?  To get rid of self-conceit.  For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.
        Epictetus (c.130-c.50 BCE); Enchiridion

[R]ecourse to history ... is meaningful to the extent that history serves to show how that-which-is has not always been; i.e., that the things which seem most evident to us are always formed in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile history. ... [T]hey reside on a base of human practice and human history; and that since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.
        Michel Foucault (1926-84); Politics, Philosophy, Culture

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but no one is entitled to his or her own facts.
        Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003)

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be...
        Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

[P]hilosophers ... who know about issues firsthand, and are aware of competing values and principles, need to enter the public square and get their hands messy in concrete cases--and they must be willing to make actual recommendations.  Unfortunately, philosophers in the classroom today more often than not present students with all sides of a question and leave it to the students to make up their own minds.  So they often revert to their prejudices.
        Paul Kurtz (1925-); "Ethics without God"

On Religion

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
        Eric Hoffer (1902-83); The True Believer

There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.
        Friedrich Nietzsche; Human, All Too Human

I dreamt that I was walking through a forest at night, with only a dim candle to light my way.  A man approached me in the darkness and said to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle so that you may see all the more clearly.'  That man was a theologian.
        Denis Diderot (1713-84)

[R]eligion is not primarily a search for truth; it is overwhelmingly a search for security.
        Bishop John Shelby Spong (1931-); The Sins of Scripture

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, that they may be seen by men.
        attributed to Jesus (c. 4 BCE-c. 30 CE); Matt. 6:5

Religious idolaters of course don't recognize their idols as such.  On the contrary, part of their religious strategy for getting life is to contrast their "true" beliefs and ethical behaviors with the idols to which secular people cling.  But as a matter of fact, religious idols are just as idolatrous as secular ones.  Indeed, this is the most prevalent and enslaving form of idolatry throughout history. ... They simply assume that their distinctions are God's distinctions, ...[so that h]owever imperfect they may be, at least they are not like those sinners.
        Reverend Gregory A. Boyd (1957-); Repenting of Religion

Fanaticism is just one step away from barbarism.
        Denis Diderot

Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men's dreams.
        David Hume (1711-76); The Natural History of Religion

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell, unless it is the sorely limited mind that has failed to describe heaven--except as a place of either worldly comfort, eternal tedium, or (as Tertullian thought) continual relish in the torture of others.
        Christopher Hitchens (1949-); god is not Great
        [N.B.: Tertullian really did claim that one of the joys of Heaven would be the ability of the righteous to witness the sufferings of the damned.]

Most members of the church's hierarchy regard the creeds as the source of the church's unity.  However, the fact is that the exact opposite is the case.  The creeds actually guarantee the disunity of the church and were consciously designed to do just that. ... [H]istory reveals that the primary purpose of any creed is to determine who it is that does not qualify for membership.  Creeds are designed to separate the true believers from the false believers.  Because creeds set boundaries, they inevitably divide.
        Bishop John Shelby Spong; The Sins of Scripture

The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation.  It is a way to fight loneliness.  Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, 'There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.'
        Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007); Palm Sunday

Each religion claims to be the one true word of God, from which it follows that each of them is full of hogwash.
        Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-); "Why the Religious Right is Wrong"

[The priests] wrote letters of blood on the path they followed, and their folly taught that truth is proved by blood.  But blood is the worst witness of truth.
        Friedrich Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. ... [T]he lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of bystanders, is permitted--at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations.
        Slavoj Žižek (1949-); "Defenders of the Faith"

The conservatives' theology also fails them when they become so obsessed about the folk outside their fold that they miss the cutting edge of God's displeasure within their gates.  For many of the most determinedly right-wing theologues, divine displeasure usually means they're not being hateful enough to others--they're not lambasting gay marriage enough, or they're not pointing out the manifest pitfalls of siding with poor blacks, even if these critics happen to be black themselves.  What usually fails to register with conservative Christians is that God might be tired of the tirades that are the bread and butter of right-wing faith.  What about God's judgment on them, a pox on their theological houses?  Such an idea, central to the prophets' call for Israel to clean up her own house lest she risk the anger of the Almighty, is almost always missing in such circles.  God forbid that such believers might actually apply to themselves the litmus tests they give to others.  When trouble or tragedy befalls conservative Christians, do they conclude that God is calling them to depart from their "wicked ways"?  Do they believe that their downfall is linked to their religious or moral views?  Is it possible that God is punishing them for their racist, sexist, or homophobic beliefs?  Such prophetic self-reflection is noticeably muted in the aftermath of suffering for the self-righteous.  In the end, it may be more important to them to maintain their beliefs in a rigidly ordered universe of ethical meaning than to sacrifice their ideas on the alter of bigger, more humane truths about God and human community.
        Reverend Michael Eric Dyson (1958-); Come Hell or High Water

The thinking of scriptural fundamentalists seems, to the secular-minded, or even to the sort of person like me who feels the constant presence of God in his life but does not believe Him to be partisan in His love, as lunacy on stilts. ... Fundamentalism is the thief of mercy.
        Jeffrey Goldberg; Prisoners

The fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.
        Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)

The positing of God is also a form of bad faith.  In crude form, it not only posits values outside of human reality, but it also transforms human reality into human nature.  Its Manichean formulations raise questions of whether human beings are good or are bad as the types of beings they are.  As a consequence, the question of what human beings choose to be isn't important.
        Lewis R. Gordon (1962-); Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

An agnostic is an atheist who has lost his nerve.
        James Morrow (1947-); interview

Having accepted the falsehood that we must run the world, we seek to get hold of the mantle of power.  Consequently, "discipleship" gets transformed: "following Jesus", rather than denoting a walking in the way of the humble Suffering Servant, denotes being "spiritual" as we seek to wield power over our fellows.
        Lee Camp; Mere Discipleship

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
        Sigmund Freud (1856-1939); The Future of an Illusion

"I believe it because it is absurd."  It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view.  If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.  The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more "miraculous" and "transcendent" than any theology.
        Christopher Hitchens; god is not Great

There are no more dangerous people on earth than those who believe they are executing the will of the almighty.
        Arthur M. Schlesinger (1917-2007); War and the American Presidency

To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.
        Titus Lucretius (c.95-c.55 B.C.E.); On the Nature of Things

The attacks of 9/11 revealed the dangers of [the Islamic fundamentalist] apocalyptic outlook. ... The same mentality [that motivated the 9/11 attackers] exists in the Western branch of what is so often called 'fundamentalism' but might be better described as 'Abrahamic apocalypticism'.  Christian premillennialists {who believe that the apocalypse is immanent} are theological refugees in a world they no longer control.  In America, fortunately, their avenues of expression usually fall short of violence... [h]owever, they have a baleful influence on American foreign policy...  They have damaged the education of American children in some places by adding scientific creationism, or its successor 'intelligent design', to the curriculum. ... On a planetary level, they are selfish, greedy, and stupid, damaging the environment by excessive use of energy and lobbying against environmental controls.  What is the point of saving the planet, they argue, if Jesus is arriving tomorrow? ... Whatever spiritual benefits individuals may have gained by taking Jesus as their personal savior, the apocalyptic fantasies harboured by born-again Christians have a negative effect on public policy.  Because of its impact on the environment and its baleful role in the Middle East, America's religiosity is a problem.
        Malise Ruthven (b. 1942); Fundamentalism

Avoid those that treat their faith as a sport and a pastime and are seduced by the life of this world. ... [For] two hungry wolves loose among sheep are not more harmful to them than the greed of a man for wealth and honor is to his religion.
        attributed to Muhammad ibn `Abdullāh (570-632); Koran (6:70) and Hadith, respectively

All things dull and ugly, /All creatures short and squat, /All things rude and nasty, /The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons, /Each little wasp that stings. /He made their brutish venom, /He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous, /All evil great and small, /All things foul and dangerous, /The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet, /Each beastly little squid. /Who made the spiky urchin? /Who made the sharks? He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous, /All pox, both great and small. /Putrid, foul, and gangrenous, /The Lord God made them all.
        The Monty Python troupe, "All Things Dull and Ugly", from the album Contractual Obligation Album

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do.  When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes.  When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head.  In once even observed the etiquette of an ashram in India, though this was a trial to me. ... I would not prohibit [religion] even if I thought I could.  Very generous of me, you may say.  But will the religious grant me the same indulgence?  I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it.  I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations.  And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition--which is that they in turn leave me alone.  But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing.
        Christopher Hitchens; god is Not Great

A cursory look at Christian history will provide ample evidence to support the conclusion that there is a very high correlation between theistic religion and killing anger.  Religious people are loath to face this fact, but it is painfully and obviously true.  One has only to listen to conversations about religion among people holding competing views to see how quickly anger surges.  These conversations rapidly escalate into high levels of noncivility.  Voices rise, emotions flow, interruptions occur, threats are made and insults are exchanged.  Religious discussions become war zones that not infrequently make street brawls look civilized.
        Bishop John Shelby Spong; Jesus for the Non-Religious

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
        H. L. Mencken (1880-1956); A Mencken Chrestomathy

Religious idolatry is subtle and insidious.  It frequently wears the mask of piety and speaks with the accents of faith. ... Well-meaning, devout people frequently presume to know more about God than we would ever claim for our own poetry or scientific calculations.  In both poetry and science we have learned that once we represent ideas by words, and concepts by pictures, limitations become obvious. ... Yet we are not bashful in making incredible claims about the wonder of God.
        Bishop John Shelby Spong & Denise G. Haines; Beyond Moralism

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious.  Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. ... Most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy.  Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying.  It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.
        Sam Harris (1967-); "An Atheist Manifesto"

What I don't understand is how people can be so sure about what's going to happen to you after death when we can't even figure things out here.
        Bill Maher; interview on the Tonight Show

If anyone says "I love God", yet hates his brother, he is a liar.
        attributed to John the Evangelist (c. 6-c. 101); 1 John 4:20

Christianity does not exist—as almost anyone must be able to see as well as I. … We are what is called a “Christian nation”—but in such a sense that not a single one of us is in the character of the Christianity of the New Testament… and [our] lives are not even an effort in the direction of becoming such....The Christianity of the New Testament simply does not exist.  Here there is nothing to reform; what has to be done is to throw light upon a criminal offense against Christianity, prolonged through centuries, perpetrated by millions (more or less guiltily), whereby they have cunningly, under the guise of perfecting Christianity, sought little by little to cheat God out of Christianity, and have succeeded in making Christianity exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.  Yes, such is the fact: the official worship of God (with the claim of being the Christianity of the New Testament) is, Christianly, a counterfeit, a forgery. … This has to be said: by ceasing to take part in the official worship of God as it now is… one has one guilt the less, and that a great one: thou dost not take part in treating God as a fool.
        Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55); Attack Upon "Christendom"

When we are confronted with an event like the Holocaust, or the death of millions in Congo in recent years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning in that they contribute to the harmony of the Whole?  Is there a Whole which can theologically justify, and thus redeem/sublate, an event like the Holocaust?
        Slavoj Žižek; "The Fear of Four Words"

The notion that Christian faith is about "believing" is a modern development and a distortion of faith.  It is the product of the Enlightenment's challenge to Christianity and religion.  In the period of the Enlightenment many traditional Christian teachings became doubtful, and Christian faith meant believing these teachings to be true despite their doubtful status.  Not only is this an odd notion of faith but it also puts the emphasis in the wrong place.  Believing is relatively impotent.  You can believe all the right things and still be a jerk, or still be in bondage, or still be miserable.
        Marcus J. Borg (1942-); "Seeing God Again"

It should give us pause that we would not have the beliefs that are central to our lives... if we had not been brought up as we in fact were.  It is an accident of birth and upbringing that we have them, rather than beliefs sharply rival to them, and (here's the rub) we shall frequently have to admit, if we are reflective and honest, that we consequently do not believe as we do because our grounds for our beliefs are superior to those which others have for their rival beliefs.
        G. A. Cohen (1941-2009); If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?

All men are ready to say that Holy Scripture is the word of God that teaches us true happiness or the way of salvation, but their actions betray a quite different opinion.  For the common people, the last thing they appear to want is to live by the teaching of Scripture.  We see them advancing false notions of their own as the word of God and seeking to use the influence of religion to compel other people to agree with them.  As for theologians, we see that for the most part they have sought to extract their own thoughts and opinions from the Bible and thereby endow them with divine authority. ... [V]ice and ambition have in the end exercised so much influence that religion has been made to consist in defending purely human delusions, rather than in following the teachings of the Holy Spirit.  Far from consisting of love, it has been turned, under the false labels of holy devotion and ardent zeal, into the promotion of conflict and dissemination of senseless hatred.
        Baruch Spinoza (1632-77); Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

[W]hy does the use of reason worry [those who claim its use in religious matter to be impious]?  What are they afraid of?  Can religion and faith not be defended, unless we make ourselves ignorant of everything and reason is totally dispensed with?  If they believe that, then surely such people fear scripture more than they trust it.
        Baruch Spinoza; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus  {emphasis mine}

On Human Nature

Be assured that a walk through the sea of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet.
        National Lampoon's Deteriorata

"There but for the grace of God," said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, "go I."  What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it really "means" anything--is, "There by the grace of God goes someone else."
        Christopher Hitchens; god is not Great

Remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
        Bertrand Russell

What does it say about our definition of human life when the perennial plea of Christian worship is for mercy?  "Lord, have mercy on us; Christ have mercy on us; Lord have mercy on us," we chant.  What kind of human being constantly begs for mercy?  Can anger that has been turned inward ever be a source of life?  Are we human beings ever helped by being told how hopeless, wretched and evil we are?  Does that ever make us whole?  Does it ever make us more loving?
        Bishop John Shelby Spong; Jesus for the Non-Religious

[T]he idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.
        Ernest Becker (1924-74); The Denial of Death

Hell is other people.
        Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80); No Exit

Everyone is not like you, your loved ones, and your friends and neighbors.  Even your friends and neighbors may not be as much like you as you suppose.
        Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)

Man is a rational animal--so at least I have been told.  Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.  On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging into madness.  I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense.
        Bertrand Russell; "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"

However vain and conceited people may be, the conception they usually have of themselves is very humble; that is, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute that a person can be; but vain and conceited they remain--comparatively speaking.  If one were to imagine a house... and if one were now to compare a human being with such a house, then the sorry and ludicrous fact with most people is, alas, that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement.
        Søren Kierkegaard; The Sickness Unto Death

In the monotonous sound of a single horn, you have a precise illustration of the effect of most peoples' minds.  How often there seems to be only one thought there! and no room for any other.  It is easy to see why people are so bored; and also why they are so sociable, why they like to go about in crowds--why mankind is so gregarious.  It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable.
        Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims

The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss... is bound to be noticed.
        Søren Kierkegaard; The Sickness Unto Death

'I have done that', says my memory.  'I cannot have done that', says my pride, and remains adamant.  At last--memory yields.
        Friedrich Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil

[I]dentity is genuine only to the extent that it reflects what is private, one's reflections about one's life and choices.  Identity is one's own to the extent that one has developed it oneself. ... Identities are therefore made, not found.  One is not alienated because one has failed to find an identity.  People never just fail to  find themselves: they are prevented or prevent themselves from creating an identity for themselves.  Identities doe not lie around to be picked up like dimes off the sidewalk, if you are looking for them and it is your lucky day; one makes oneself be a definite person if conditions allow one that much space and creativity.
        Richard Schmitt; Alienation and Class

[This] is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.  Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
        Stanley Milgram (1933-84); "The Perils of Obedience"

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.
        attributed to George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

[W]e are mammals and the prefrontal lobe (at least while we wait for genetic engineering) is too small while the adrenaline gland is too big.
        Christopher Hitchens; Letters to a Young Contrarian

The problem with the liberal notion of "expressing one's true self" is that it confers the form of the authentic Self on what is a mere imitation of public clichés.
        Slavoj Žižek; For They Know Not What They Do

Only the shallow know themselves.
        Oscar Wilde (1854-1900); "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young"

On the Meaning of Life

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
        Kurt Vonnegut; Timequake

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
        William Shakespeare (1564-1616); Macbeth

Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.  Reckless of chance, blind to good and evil, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.
        Bertrand Russell; "A Free Man's Worship"

Life may be scary, but it's only temporary.
        from the musical Avenue Q, written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx

What is it about [the myth of Sisyphus], then, that so perfectly expresses the idea of meaninglessness...?  It is, clearly, the element of endless and pointless repetition.  The same thing happens over and over again and nothing ever comes of it. ... Is this, then, also a picture of human existence?  To a very large extent it is.  The lives of most people are like clockwork, endlessly repetitive.  They rise, do essentially the same things today that they were doing yesterday and that they will do again tomorrow, repeating this pattern year after year until, finally, they go to their graves leaving nothing of worth behind except a new generation to repeat the cycle.
        Richard Taylor (1919-2003); "The Meaning of Life"

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental.  Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.
        Arthur Schopenhauer; "On the Suffering of Life"

We are here on Earth to fart around; and don't let anyone tell you different.
        Kurt Vonnegut; A Man without a Country

The society in which we live incessantly counsels us to solve our problems by spending money, and thus suggests that if we do have difficulties, more money will probably solve them.  If your work no longer satisfies, take a job that pays more.  If your family life is unsatisfactory, get a more expensive therapist, or buy a bigger house, or a fancier car.  .. [C]apitalism encourages us to think about and treat ourselves exclusively as economic agents, motivated by nothing so much as the inclination to "truck and barter".  But as economic agents we are not concerned about the meaning of our lives, about their continuity, or whether they are our own in any sense.  ...  [C]apitalism encourages alienation by deflecting attention from the meaning and coherence of one's own life.
        Richard Schmitt; Alienation and Freedom

If you ask any man in America, or any man in business in England, what it is that most interferes with his enjoyment of existence, he will say: "The struggle for life."  He will say this in all sincerity; he will believe it.  In a certain sense it is true; yet in another, and that a very important sense, it is profoundly false. ... [The] "struggle for life" ... is an inaccurate phrase which he has picked up in order to give dignity to something essentially trivial. ... What people mean ... by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success.  What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.
        Bertrand Russell; The Conquest of Happiness

Do something, something to justify your existence ... because it would be too senseless after all for so many to have died while you live doing nothing with your life.
        Charlotte Delbo (1913-85); Auschwitz and After

[O]ne of the main problems of life is that living is so banal.
        James Baldwin (1924-87); Giovanni's Room

It is because one can be frivolous that the majority of people do not hang themselves.
        attributed to Voltaire (1694-1778)

[T]he whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
        Bertrand Russell; Autobiography

On Ethics

[Moral] platitudes are easy, innocent, and comfortable.  They deceive us into thinking that we can be good without cost.
        Bishop John Shelby Spong & Denise G. Haines; Beyond Moralism

I have never come across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity.  Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
        Oscar Wilde; The English Renaissance of Art

[T]hose who under perfectly normal conditions appeal to high-flung moral standards are very much like those who take God's name in vain.
        Hannah Arendt (1906-75); "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy"

Of all things that injure man there is none worse than believing that one practices virtue perfectly.  When the mind only looks inward on itself, it leads to ruin.  The evil quality appears in a man loving only his own views and reviling whatever he does not do himself.
        Zhuangzi (c. 370- c. 301 BCE); The Book of Chuang Tzu

[T]he more completely you trust your feelings, the more astray they are likely to lead you.  The first urge is often the least responsible one.
        Vincent Ryan Ruggiero; Making Your Mind Matter

That people in need are ignored or abandoned for political reasons reveals what we are lacking--though we are intelligent and powerful, strong enough to exploit peoples and destroy the world, we lack real kindness and love.
        Dalai Lama XIV, Tenzin Gyatso (1935-); How to Expand Love

[W]hen people assume the position of moral guardians of the culture, they invite--they earn!--the charge of hypocrisy.
        Reverend Gregory A. Boyd; The Myth of a Christian Nation

Not only is ethics fragile and easily overridden.  Not only is it subject to subversion.  It can be an immense force for evil as well as good... [E]thics is not simply a solution for social and political ills.  It is also a problem and even a contributor to them.
        John K. Roth (1940-); Ethics During and After the Holocaust

[I]t is all too easy to ... think we know 'intuitively' what is right and wrong--it would be remarkable if we did, since we have no other substantial intuitive knowledge.
        Michael Tanner; Nietzsche

All discrimination is immoral, and to struggle against it is a duty whatever the conditions that have to be confronted.
        Paulo Freire (1921-97); Pedagogy of Freedom

Clever talk can confound the workings of moral force, just as small impatiences can confound great projects.
        attributed to K'ung Fu-Tzu (c. 551-c. 479 B.C.E.)

You shall not follow a multitude to do evil.
        Exodus 23:2

There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing.
        F. M. Cornford (1874-1943); Microcosmographia Academica

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary.  Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
        Albert Einstein (1879-1955); "Religion and Science"

Here's a reassuring cliché: "For the sake of the children". ... "For the sake of the children": end of discussion.  What a noble sacrifice; virtue is in your court.  Though needless to say, "for the sake of the children" is a rather selective enterprise, holding sway far more frequently when it comes to guilty matters like divorce than when it comes to pocketbook issues like education spending... or when it comes to every other form of childhood health and well-being...  Sentimentality about children's welfare comes and goes apparently: highest when there's a chance to moralize about adult behavior, lowest when it comes to resource allocation.
        Laura Kipnis; Against Love

Truly he who gives other men what is due to them because he fears the gallows... cannot be called just; but he who gives other men what is due to them because he knows the true rationale of laws and understands their necessity... is deservedly called just.
        Baruch Spinoza; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

On Society and Politics

Good judgment means understanding how to be responsible to those who pay the price of your decisions.
        Michael Ignatieff (1947); "Getting Iraq Wrong"

The gigantic protection racket  of political history began: Accept my power, for I will protect you from worse violence--of which I can give you a sample, if you don't believe me.
        Michael Mann; The Sources of Social Power

An uncritical application of moral precepts and rigid rules to hurting lives trapped in a compromised society is not righteousness.  It is lovelessness.  Laws made for the good of the whole society have little relevance to individuals whose personal histories force them to make choices not from ideal options but from available ones.
        Bishop John Shelby Spong & Denise G. Haines; Beyond Moralism

There are worse things in life than making poor decisions--such as living in a society where there are no good options.  Fortunately, that's not our problem in the United States.  Our problem is that the genuinely good options aren't available to everybody.  People don't choose to ignore their health or embrace predatory lending rates.  The idea that people can choose what they want is an oversimplification, and a dangerous one. ... It is just too easy to make people look personally responsible for bad outcomes when, in fact, all of their realistic options were bad ones.
        J. D. Trout (1959-); The Empathy Gap (italics mine)

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. ... The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select.  Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.
        José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955); The Revolt of the Masses

The first man who enclosed a piece of land, who then came up with the idea of saying "this is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.  How many crimes, wars, and murders stem from this act.
        Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-77); Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Today there are kings without crowns; they are the monopolies, the true masters of entire nations and at times of entire continents.  That has been the case until now on the African continent and a good part of the Asian continent and unfortunately on our Latin American continent as well. ... The importance of the monopolies is immense, so great that it makes political power disappear in many of our republics.
        Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1923-67); "Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence"

The fact is that the so-called European civilization--"Western" civilization--as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: The problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of "reason" or before the bar of "conscience"; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.  Europe is indefensible.
        Aimé Césaire (1913-2008); Discourse on Colonialism

If law is such a harbinger of good, why do we work so hard to keep it from our most cherished relationships?
        Olúfémi Táíwò; Legal Naturalism

"[T]ough-mindedness" is another expression of the abdication of intelligence.  It refuses to discuss the specific problems and specific ways of handling them, smothering all problems under a blanket allegiance to some vaguely defined goal.  It wraps itself up in the blind faith, essentially religious, that no matter what is done, things will come right in the end.  ...  It is really not an attitude of tough-mindedness at all, for it cannot face or live with the truth.  It cannot bear to see its assumptions put into the crucible of doubt.  Rather it is a tender-minded sentimentalism that reads its pious wishes into the mysterious "workings" of history.
        Sidney Hook (1902-89); Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life

The newspapers, with only occasional partial lapses into decency, have acted upon a very simple principle: identify a fairly widespread prejudice, pander to it and inflame it, in the process misleading or actually lying to the readers as far as can be safely done.
        Michael A. E. Dummett (1925-); On Immigration and Refugees

... [M]ost pleas for so-called nonviolent solutions to problems of systematic oppression fail, ultimately, to make a proper case for their own relevance.  In an oppressive regime, bent upon its own theodicean preservation--where evil can only be accounted for through the existence of bad individuals or groups, not the system--any effort toward systematic change will be regarded as violent.  Consequently, to meet the system's criteria for nonviolence, one must ensure the preservation of the system itself.
        Lewis R. Gordon (1962-); Her Majesty's Other Children

Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honors--such honors as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes.  The condition is that one does not try to escape the invisible cage.
        Ernesto "Che" Guevara; Socialism and Man in Cuba

Let me give you a word on the philosophy of reform.  The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.  That struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.  Power concedes nothing without demand.  It never did and it never will.
        Frederick Douglass (1818-95)

A politician owes the people not only his industry but his judgment, and if he sacrifices his judgment to their opinions, he betrays them.
        attributed to Edmund Burke (1729-97)

We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults.  But the Founders would have thought that we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way.  This view--which we see as patriotic--is the very opposite of the view that they held.  They would not have considered our attitude patriotic--or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile.
        Naomi Wolf (1962-); The End of America

Why is it [that] people defending the official mythology all end up spewing ridiculous drivel?
        Richard Curtis; Society for the Philosophical Study of Marxism listserv

Although the Constitution set up a system of checks and balances between the branches of government..., in fact, all three branches were controlled by the ruling class.  The checks were on working class power and the balance was in the variety of governmental tools that the ruling class could use to remain hidden but in control.
        Paul Kivel; You Call This a Democracy?

We must have the historic humility to recognize that it is always far easier, with twenty-twenty hindsight, to criticize past abuses--especially if they occurred elsewhere--than it is to recognize their current counterparts in our own backyards.
        Nadine Strossen (1950-); Foreword to Marty Klein, America's War on Sex

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
        Reverend Michael Eric Dyson; I May Not Get There With You

[T]rue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial.  It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
        Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68)

The conservative reaction ... seeks a profound transformation of the terms of political discourse and the creation of a new 'definition of reality', which under the cover of 'individual liberty' would legitimize inequalities and restore the hierarchical relations which the struggles of previous decades had destroyed. ... The task of the left therefore cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and expand it in the direction of radical and plural democracy.
        Ernesto Laclau (1935-) and Chantal Mouffe (1943-); Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Are we not living in an economic world, or as R. H. Tawney says, in an "acquisitive society" which unleashes naked greed, fosters Machiavellian business methods and, indeed allows them to become the rule, drowns all higher motives in the "icy water of egotistical calculation" (to borrow from the Communist Manifesto), and lets people gain the world but lose their souls?  Is there any more certain way of desiccating the soul of man than the habit of constantly thinking about money and what it can buy?  Is there a more potent poison than our economic system's all-pervasive commercialism?
        Wilhelm Ropke; A Humane Economy

What other arguments can you resort to when your ideology is outdated--except apocalyptic predictions of misery, disease, and God's wrath?
        E. J. Graff; What is Marriage For?

The odd thing is that such overwhelming cultural conformity is also endlessly touted as the triumph of freedom and individuality over the shackling social conventions of the past... What a startling degree of conformity is so meekly accepted--and so desired!--by a species, homo Americanus, for whom other threats to individuality do so often become fighting matters, a people whose jokes (and humor is nothing if not an act of cultural self-definition) so frequently mock others for their behavioral conformity...
        Laura Kipnis; Against Love

The classic trap for any revolutionary is always 'What's your alternative?'  But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it: in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know.  In fact this is a common offensive, a technique to deflect revolutionary anger and turn it against itself.  Moreover, the oppressed have no job to convince all people.  All they need to know is that the present system is destroying them.
        Shulamith Firestone (1945-); The Dialectic of Sex

You have so much potential, but you're on the brink of complete disaster.  You are at constant war and living in disease you cannot cure.  Some of you gleefully wallow in excess while your brother next to you starves.  And in doing so you are destroying your ecosystem beyond repair.  What most disturbs us is that you are fully aware of your situation and actions... and though you have evolved to a place to do something about it, you do nothing.
        from a statement by the Skrull invasion force (2008), c/o Brian Michael Bendis (1967-)

We live in a world in which the dogma of free-market fundamentalism is global ... and that form of dogma is deployed in order to hide and conceal the interests of the elite at the top, losing sight of working people and poor people. ... We live in a time when workers find themselves up against a brick wall and poor people are rendered invisible, as if they don't count at all.
        Cornel West (1953-); "Nelson Mandela"

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
        Terry Eagleton (1943-); Ideology

It is entirely legitimate to stipulate axiomatically that, beyond a certain sum, when one starts calculating in the tens of millions, all capitalist money is bound to be dirty.
        Alain Badiou (1937-); Metapolitics

Panics about popular culture... often [mask] attempts to condemn the tastes and cultural preferences of less powerful social groups. ... It's more socially acceptable to make fun of something working-class people might enjoy then appear snobby and insensitive for criticizing people for their economic status.  The same is true of criticizing rap music rather than African American youth directly.  In other words, popular culture  is frequently used as a proxy for hostility, and so we condemn a group's cultural preferences rather than openly express enmity toward the group.
        Karen Sternheimer; Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture

                On Race, Ethnicity and Nationality

Negroes want to be treated like men, a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words.  [Yet] people who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this statement utterly incomprehensible.
        James Baldwin (1924-); Nobody Knows

[I]t is easy to love the idealized figure of a poor, helpless neighbor, the starving African or Indian, for example; in other words, it is easy to love one's neighbor as long as he stays far enough from us, as long as there is a proper distance separating us.  The problem arises at the moment when he comes too near us, when we start to feel his suffocating proximity--at this moment when the neighbor exposes himself to us too much, love can suddenly turn into hatred.
        Slavoj Žižek; Enjoy Your Symptom!

Some believe that there is a conflict between the so-called American Creed and American practices.  The Creed is supposed to contain considerations of equality and liberty, at least certainly equal opportunity, and justice.  The fact is, of course, that these are simply words which were not even originally intended to have applicability to black people: Article 1 of the Constitution affirms that the black man is three-fifths of a person.  The fact is that people live their daily lives making practical day-to-day decisions about their jobs, homes, children.  And in a profit-oriented, materialistic society, there is little time to reflect on creeds, especially if it could mean more job competition, "lower property values" and the "daughter marrying a Negro."
        Stokeley Carmichael (1941-1998) and Charles V. Hamilton; Black Power

I am an invisible man.  No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasm. ... I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. ... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me.
        Ralph Ellison (1914-94); The Invisible Man

As the history of Nazi Germany so emphatically shows, racism's "logic" ultimately entails genocide, for if you take seriously the idea that one race endangers the well-being of another, the only way to remove that menace completely is to do away, once and for all, with everyone and everything that embodies it.
        John K. Roth; Holocaust Politics

The matters of personal and social identity are difficult to specify in a settled manner and are always charged with a host of complex, sometimes conflicting, meanings and implications.  Since identity is always a matter of interpretations that are both socially imposed and more or less self-constituted ... identity is always socially and historically conditioned and variable: individually; by class ...; by religious affiliation, or the absence of such; by other organizational affiliations; by locales ... and their demographic configurations; by physical ability and make-up and the ways these are perceived and valued, personally and by others; and so forth.  It has never been the case that all black folks, by virtue of being "black", phenotypically and/or socially/culturally, have shared a singularly defined sense of themselves.  We African and African-descended peoples have always been diverse in our similarity, similar in our diversity.
        Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr. (1944-); "Racial and Ethnic Complexities in American Life"

[W]hat we are witnessing today in our everyday life is not an eagerness on the part of neighbors and strangers to develop a world perspective, but a return to narrow nationalism, isolationisms and xenophobia. ... It is apparent that one of the primary reasons we have not experienced a revolution of values is that a culture of domination necessarily promotes addiction to lying and denial.  That lying takes the presumably innocent form of many white people (and even some black folks) suggesting that racism does not exist anymore, and that conditions of social equality are solidly in place that would enable any black person who works hard to achieve economic self-sufficiency. ... Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that [the] feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted...  Add to this the widely held assumptions that blacks, other minorities, and white women are taking jobs from white men, and that people are poor and unemployed because they want to be, and it becomes most evident that part of our contemporary crisis is created by a lack of meaningful access to truth. ... When this collective cultural consumption of and attachment to misinformation is coupled with the layers of lying individuals do in their personal lives, our capacity to face reality is severely diminished as is our will to intervene and change unjust circumstances.
        bell hooks [Gloria Watkins] (1952-); Teaching to Transgress

last updated 3/9/10