Philosopher Mixer Debate Guide

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Philosopher mixer

A definition of a philosopher: someone who gives helpful advice to people who are happier that he is.

- Tom Lehrer    

Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

- Aristotle    Nicomachean Ethics

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves, we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, obligation requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly its counterpart.

- Thomas Jefferson    to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:140

Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

- Nietzsche    The Gay Science, s.112, Walter Kaufmann translation

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods, ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

- Plato    Laws

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

- Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)    

In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.

- Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895)    lecture 1854

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

- Marilyn vos Savant    

Realism...has no more to do with reality than anything else.

- Hob Broun    

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)    "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?", 1947

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

- Victor Cousin (1792 - 1867)    

Time is just something that we assign. You know, past, present, it's just all arbitrary. Most Native Americans, they don't think of time as linear; in time, out of time, I never have enough time, circular time, the Stevens wheel. All moments are happening all the time.

- Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess    Northern Exposure, Hello, I Love You, 1994

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.

- J. K. Rowling    Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge.

- Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)    The Confucian Analects

People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.

- Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)    The Way of Lao-tzu

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we made today.

- Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)    Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25th, 1916

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

- George Bernard Shaw    

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

- Frank Lloyd Wright, 1908    

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

- Voltaire (1694 - 1778)    

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

- Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)    

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

- Woody Allen    

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

- Eugene McCarthy (1916 - 2005)    Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

- Aristotle    

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

- Douglas Adams    

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.

- Dave Barry    "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly Do"

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

- Mark Twain    Following the Equator (1897)

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

- Benjamin Franklin    report to the King of France on Animal Magnetism, 1784

I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in the changing of the Muses; I have been versed in the reasonings of men; but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

- Euripides    Alcestis, 438 B.C.

There is measure in all things.

- Horace    Satires

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

- Cicero    

Evil deeds do not prosper; the slow man catches up with the swift.

- Homer    The Odyssey

Whenever I hear people talking about "liberal ideas," I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe    

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

- Jane Austen    Mansfield Park

God made Truth with many doors to welcome every believer who knocks on them.

- Kahlil Gibran    

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

- Seneca    Epistles

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

- Sir Winston Churchill    Hansard, November 12, 1936

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

- Helen Keller    

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence.

- William Shakespeare    "Macbeth", Act 1 scene 3

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

- Martin Luther King Jr.    

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.

- Aesop    The Old Man and Death

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

- Albert Einstein    "Geometry and Experience", January 27, 1921