Quotes

Since his philosophical writing adopted selflessness and self-abnegation, whereas Schopenhauer himself led the life of a self-centered curmudgeon in affluent comfort, the charge of hypocrisy and inconsistency was made against him.

Schopenhauer replied that it sufficed for a philosopher to examine the human condition and determine the best form of life for man: that he should also provide an example of it in his own proceedings was asking far too much.

Schopenhauer vividly illustrates the irony of the human condition where all too often the intellect acknowledges the advantage of going where the will is unwilling to follow. And since this tension between intellect and will was the keystone of his philosophy, Schopenhauer’s proceedings did perhaps manage after all to provide that example of living by one’s doctrine.

Nicholas Rescher, A journey through philosophy in 101 anecdotes, Pittsburgh, 2015, p. 167

The problems which most perplex tennis players are not those deal- ing with the proper way to swing a racket. Books and professionals giving this information abound. Nor do most players complain excessively about physical limitations. The most common com- plaint of sportsmen ringing down the corridors of the ages is, “It’s not that I don’t know what to do, it’s that I don’t do what I know!”

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, New York, 1974, p. 13

[T]he average number of deaths from poverty each day is equivalent to 100 jumbo jets, each carrying 500 people (mostly children), crashing with no survivors. From a human perspective, severe poverty should be the top story in every newspaper, ever newscast, and every news website, every day.

Thomas Pogge & Leif Wenar Patricia Illingworth (ed.), Giving Well, 2011, p. 104

[W]hile the problem of interpersonal comparability of utility is a tricky one, it is not insoluble in principle. It is conceivable that, perhaps several hundred (or a thousand) years from now, neurology may have advanced to the stage where the level of happiness can be accurately correlated to some cerebral reaction that can be measured by a ‘eudaimonometer’. Hence the definition of social welfare [in terms of the sum total of individual happiness] is an objective definition, although the objects are the subjective feelings of individuals.

Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare economics: towards a more complete analysis, London, 2004, p. 4

Looking back, […] almost every war every country has fought was a mistake. When we consider fighting a new war, we are tempted to believe this war is an exception to the rule. But this belief is itself unexceptional.

Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: what everyone needs to know, Oxford, 2012, pp. 80-81

Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ’truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.

Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Bbeliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, Florida, 2007, p. 7

Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy. He couldn’t stand that there were so many bad, inefficient nonprofits out there, eating up donor money. When a business was based on a bad idea, it failed, but nonprofits never failed—they just kept on raising cash from people who wanted to believe in them. He imagined himself travelling around the country as judge and executioner, closing down hundreds of ineffective N.G.O.s.

I try not to speak more clearly than I think.

Niels Bohr, quoted in Richard Rhodes, The making of the atomic bomb, New York, 1986, p. 77

C’est une grande habileté que de savoir cacher son habileté.

François de La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, Paris, 1665

I sometimes want to kick my car[.] Since I have this anger at material objects, which is manifestly irrational, it’s easier to me to think, when I get angry with people, that this is also irrational.

Derek Parfit, An interview with Derek Parfit, Cogito, vol. 9, no. 2, 1995, pp. 115–125, p. 118

In order to succeed it is not necessary to be much cleverer than other people. All you have to do is be one day ahead of them.

Leó Szilárd, quoted in Leo Szilard, “I'm looking for a market for wisdom”, Life, vol. 51, no. 9, 1961, pp. 75, p. 75

It’s easy to change a child but hard to keep him from changing back. Instead of thinking of children as lumps of clay for parents to mold, we should think of them as plastic that flexes in response to pressure—and pops back to its original shape once the pressure is released.

Bryan Caplan, Selfish reasons to have more kids: why being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think, New York, 2011, p. 5

The fact that we exist is a proof that [massive energetic release] did not occur; that it has not occurred is the best possible assurance that it never will.

Frederick Soddy, Atomic Transmutation: The Greatest Discovery Ever Made, London, 1953, p. 95

If the increase in well-being is largely illusory in the long term, once preferences and expectations have adjusted, the famous are trapped in the worst of all possible worlds. Their fame brings little benefit, while they are imprisoned by their need to preserve their reputation.

Tyler Cowen, What price fame?, Cambridge, Mass, 2000, p. 160

As long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world.

William James, quoted in Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the modern world, Seattle, 1939, p. 67

Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

Cary Grant, quoted in Graham McCann, Cary Grant: A Class Apart, New York, 1996, p. 5

Some performers manipulate the style of their product to shift the incentives of critics to pay attention. Richard Posner cites Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Kafka as figures who owe part of their reputation to the enigmatic and perhaps even contradictory nature of their writings. Unclear authors, at least if they have substance and depth, receive more attention from critics and require more textual exegesis. Individual critics can establish their own reputations by studying such a writer and by promoting one interpretation of that writer’s work over another These same critics will support the inclusion of the writer in the canon, to promote the importance of their own criticism. In effect, deep and ambiguous writers are offering critics implicit invitations to serve as co-authors of a broader piece of work.

Tyler Cowen, What price fame?, Cambridge, Mass, 2000, pp. 34-35

Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

William James, The letters of William James, Boston, 1920, p. 249

Generalization would lead to the recognition of value in possible future experiences, in the means to them, and in the lives of creatures other than ourselves. These values are not extra properties of goodness and badness, but just truths such as the following: If something I do will cause another creature to suffer, that counts against doing it. I can come to see that this is true by generalizing from the evident disvalue of my own suffering[.]

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford, 2012, p. 77

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford, 2012, p. 51