I believe there is no permanent greatness to a nation except it be based upon morality. I do not care for military greatness or military renown. I care for the condition of the people among whom I live.
John Bright, from a speech in Birmingham (October 29, 1858), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 274-275.
WHATEVER YOU DO, TELL THE TRUTH.
Presidential candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland’s telegram response to a query as to what the Democratic Party should say about reports that he fathered a child out of wedlock. The issue was scandalous, but he won office and his first term in the presidency of the United States started in 1885.
Being true is different from being taken as true, whether by one or by many or everybody, and in no case is it to be reduced to it. There is no contradiction in something’s being true which everybody takes to be false.
Gottlob Frege, Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (The Foundations of Arithmetic (vol. 1, 1893; vol. 2, 1903), Introduction, Montgomery Furth, translator (1964).
Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world’s history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidentally occurred to their authors.
Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” in The Monist Vol. I, No. 2 (January 1891), p. 161. Reprinted in many collections, including Justus Buchler, editor, The Philosophy of Charles Peirce (1940).
We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.
Iris Murdoch, concluding sentence to Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953).
It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction . . . in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.
Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to make our ideas clear,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878).
‘Facts, facts, facts,’ cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men’s varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science.
Gottlob Frege, “The thought: A logical inquiry,” in Peter Ludlow’s Readings in the Philosophy of Language (1997), p. 27.
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
Thomas Szasz, in The Second Sin (1973), p. 20.
A wise man’s country is the world.
According to Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book I: “The Seven Sages.”
The universe is an intelligence test.
Timothy Leary, as quoted in Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 170.