"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."

Heinlein, Robert on experts   

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."

Zappa, Frank on music
4 fans of this quote   

"The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made."

Zappa, Frank on music
3 fans of this quote   

"A drug is neither moral nor immoral -- it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole."

Zappa, Frank on drugs
6 fans of this quote   

"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."

Eco, Umberto on courage
4 fans of this quote   

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear."

Twain, Mark on courage
11 fans of this quote   

"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."

Heinlein, Robert on experience
3 fans of this quote   

"When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects, this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive."

Heinlein, Robert on government
3 fans of this quote   

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

Heinlein, Robert on humankind
3 fans of this quote   

"No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers."

Heinlein, Robert on people
4 fans of this quote   

"Belief gets in the way of learning."

Heinlein, Robert on belief
6 fans of this quote   

"To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer."

Heinlein, Robert on chance
4 fans of this quote   

"Do we really want to know how Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man -- and, until he tells us, it doesn't make too much difference whether or not he really is bad."

Zappa, Frank on stardom
5 fans of this quote   

"Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery."

Miller, Henry on philosophers and philosophy
4 fans of this quote   

"In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all."

Murdoch, Iris on philosophers and philosophy   

"To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher."

Pascal, Blaise on philosophers and philosophy
4 fans of this quote   

"Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them."

Plato on philosophers and philosophy   

"Many talk like philosophers yet live like fools."

Proverb on philosophers and philosophy
5 fans of this quote   

"Philosophy may be dodged, eloquence cannot."

Quinet, Edgar on philosophers and philosophy   

"There is no record in history of a happy philosopher."

Mencken, H. L. on philosophers and philosophy   

"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."

Mencken, H. L. on philosophers and philosophy
4 fans of this quote   

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Marx, Karl on philosophers and philosophy   

"Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love."

Marx, Karl on philosophers and philosophy   

"There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections."

Maistre, Joseph De on philosophers and philosophy   

"In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man."

Macaulay, Thomas B. on philosophers and philosophy   

"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."

Leary, Timothy on philosophers and philosophy   

"If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."

Johnson, Samuel on philosophers and philosophy   

"The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food."

Reade, W. Winwood on philosophers and philosophy   

"The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics."

Rorty, Richard on philosophers and philosophy   

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies."

Shakespeare, William on philosophers and philosophy
3 fans of this quote   

"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on philosophers and philosophy
3 fans of this quote   

"Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on philosophers and philosophy
3 fans of this quote   

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes."

Wittgenstein, Ludwig on philosophers and philosophy   

"The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting."

Weil, Simone on philosophers and philosophy   

"The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy."

Voltaire on philosophers and philosophy   

"Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher."

Unknown, Source on philosophers and philosophy   

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

Thoreau, Henry David on philosophers and philosophy   

"What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?"

Thoreau, Henry David on philosophers and philosophy   

"Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them."

Stevens, Wallace on philosophers and philosophy   

"The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence."

Stevens, Wallace on philosophers and philosophy