Ibn Khaldun Quotes

Aristotle: that celebrated heathen, who, in all matters wherein heathenism did not destroy his competence, had established a despotic empire over the Christian world.

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.

Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.

If Plato is a fine red wine, then Aristotle is a dry martini.

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

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.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

That which exercises reason is more excellent than that which does not exercise reason

Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

We are political animals, as, not without reason, affirmed Aristotle, who perhaps influenced humanity's thinking more than any other ancient philosopher through his almost 200 treatises, according to reports, of which only 31 have been preserved.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!

What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational

Socrates... Whom well inspir'd the oracle pronounc'd Wisest of men.

The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world.