Philosophical Impact Quotes

What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.

Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history.

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

France used to have the ability to inspire princes and kings, send her philosophers to the courts of Europe whose elites spoke our language… now no one listens to her anymore and the universe turns without her …

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

Philosophy can't build bridges, but can encourage people to cross them.

I sensed that Confucius is an interesting character. This is someone who lived over 2,500 years ago and is still speaking to us. That people are still reading and repeating what he said so long ago is something I find quite fascinating.

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

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.

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor.

I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.

The chief benefit, which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from its immediate application.

To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work.

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

Man has never been the same since God died.

It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.

It seems then, say I, that you leave politics entirely out of the question, and never suppose, that a wise magistrate can justly be jealous of certain tenets of philosophy, such as those of Epicurus, which, denying a divine existence, and consequently a providence and a future state, seem to loosen, in a great measure, the ties of morality, and may be supposed, for that reason, pernicious to the peace of civil society.

All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.

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

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.