“A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.”

“It can’t happen here” is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.

The simple truth is that truth is hard to come by, and that once found may easily be lost again.

The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty, and both should be abandoned.

Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory but progress.

If you can’t say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can.

“We don’t know anything” and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.

While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.

We can all participate in the heritage of man. We all can help to preserve it. And we can all make our own modest contribution to it.

We all have an unscientific weakness for being always in the right, and this weakness seems to be particularly common among professional and amateur politicians.

History has no meaning.

I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate.

Great men may make great mistakes.

What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.

Philosophy bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.

The poem of the understanding is philosophy.