Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to…

“What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language…

— Alain de Botton

“Like the character Moliere who discovered to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life, I discovered to my astonishment that…

— Bryan Magee

“Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and…

— Alan Moore

As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

“To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom—freedom of the mind from…

— Bernard Lewis

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world…

— Thomas Paine

“...from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?”

— J.M. Coetzee

It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be…

— Leo Strauss

Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily…

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in…

— Walter Dean Myers

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say…

— Paul Auster

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body,…

— Ted Hughes

I believe in the goodness of man, and I believe we're all connected and that connection is through God. We have our differences. But…

— Corbin Bernsen

To the distracting occupations belong especially my lecture courses which I am holding this winter for the first time, and which now cost much…

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

We must master our egoism, and through this mastery, step outside ourselves and educate ourselves in giving. Fasting requires that we rediscover all that…

— Tariq Ramadan