philosophy Quotes

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.

I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.