All Kenny Smith Quotes
- Take a good long look at human beings in their actual practices and motives; bring the utmost psychological and bio-economic factors to bear on making… Actual
- There is a form of poetic and esthetic and moral genius necessary to make philosophical issues truly incandesce for students, and even though I indeed… Among
- Values and verdicts never bother me half as much as people trying to weasel their way around them, or people compromising their reason to pander… Bother
- Hegel understood the Heisenbergian reality of knowing: yes, it would be nice if we could somehow delicately capture the truth and bring it closer to… Act
- Philosophy exists in profoundest opposition to rhetoric, which is speaking for the sake of producing or controlling some effect in others' perceptions. Philosophy is about… Caustic
- In late modernity we grow more and more accustomed to politicians and public figures who are indebted to their appetites for their "values," to their… Accustomed
- "The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes… Abstract
- The Zen masters have the right idea-no pain no gain: thwack a silly nebbish and he'll remember it far longer and more indelibly than any… Absolutely
- American democracy is a chess-game in which pawns imagine themselves to be free individuals with wills of their own: that delusion is one of the… Across
- It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) "individuals," because in actuality moderns are "types," abstracted and self-abstractive… Abstracted
- The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis;… Academia
- One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of… Academia
- I have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and… Americans
- Sadly the very thing that strikes us as obvious always defeats our thinking about it in more penetrating ways: just as the Romans said that… Always Defeats
- Human beings "belong" to some minor comity or enclave of faith at the expense of the clarity and autarkia of their intelligence and conscience, of… Another Way
- Among the multitudes will be found many who cannot discriminate between what is merely wanted and what is needed, what is necessary for bare subsistence… Among
- Nothing in our politics is any longer driven or designed by individual humans who have a name and a face; we have sunk from theism… Abstract
- If you like capitalism, you will positively love depressions, because they are one and the same, like manic-depressives and their cycles, like spouse-abusers and their… Abusers
- I can't convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained… Americans
- Should a reasonable person not demand that philosophy should not be foolishly purveyed before people incompetent to see the point of it, as pearls before… Correct
- I regret not getting brutally forthright with human beings a hell of a lot sooner than I did. Civility and obliquity are wasted on people… Beings
- Human life is an extension of the principles of nature, and human civilization is a venture extrapolated out of human natures: man and his natural… All
- Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth… Apathy
- So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at… Aborted
- "Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official… Agnosticism