George Orwell - 1984

I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

(...)

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

Alfred Jules Ayer - Language, Truth, and Logic

The metaphysician, on the other hand, does not intend to write nonsense. He lapses into it through being deceived by grammar, or through committing errors of reasoning, such as that which leads to the view that the sensible world is unreal. But it is not the mark of a poet simply tdmake mistakes of this sort. There are some, indeed, who would see in the fact that the metaphysician's utterances are senseless a reason against the view that they have aesthetic value.

Murray N. Rothbard - The Ethics of Liberty

All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as "taxation," although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute." Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects.

Murray N. Rothbard - For A New Liberty

... libertarians and other Americans must guard against a priori history: in this case, against the assumption that, in any conflict, the State which is more democratic or allows more internal freedom is necessarily or even presumptively the victim of aggression by the more dictatorial or totalitarian State. There is simply no historical evidence whatever for such a presumption. In deciding on relative rights and wrongs, on relative degrees of aggression in any dispute in foreign affairs, there is no substitute for a detailed empirical, historical investigation of the dispute itself. It should occasion no great surprise, then, if such an investiga tion concludes that a democratic and relatively far freer United States has been more aggressive and imperialistic in foreign affairs than a relatively totalitarian Russia or China.

Noam Chomsky - Syntactic Structures

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Frédéric Bastiat - The Law

It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion– whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government– at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty.

Jaegwon Kim - Philosophy of Mind

Agatha Christie - Crooked House

... and they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Ron Paul - The Revolution; A Manifesto [Audiobook]

Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

Sam Harris - The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason [Audiobook]

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.

Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything [Audiobook]

Religion has run out of justifications.

Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism and Human Emotions

I am responsible for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. [...] To make myself passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon Others is still to choose myself, and suicide is one mode among others of being-in-the-world. [...] "Why was I born?" or curse the day of my birth or declare that I did not ask to be born, for these various attitudes toward my birth-i.e, toward the fact that I realize a presence in the world-are absolutely nothing else but ways of assuming this birth in full responsibility and of making it mine.

Jean-Paul Sartre - Existentialism Is a Humanism

Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.

Jerry H. Gill - Metaphilosophy: An Introduction

Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Robert Klee (editor) - Scientific Inquiry: Readings in the Philosophy of Science

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. -- W.V. Quine

John Losee - A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (1st Edition:1972)

The distinction which has been indicated between science and philosophy of science is not a sharp one. It is based on a difference of intent rather than a difference in subject-matter.

James Bissett Pratt - Naturalism

Its (naturalism) aim, as we have seen, is not propaganda; neither is it self-deception. It is seeking not a pleasant feeling state nor a comfortable belief, but the truth. And Naturalism believes that the truth is what it is, no matter what we think about it. Nature, the world of reality, has a character, a structure of its own, and our opinions are true only in so far as they conform to this actual situation. (...) Another form of the Will-to-Believe which the naturalist cannot share is the attitude of the man who, more or less deliberately, allows his view of Reality to be colored or determined by the romantic and poetic tendencies of the human mind. This does not mean that the naturalistic view will necessarily be unpoetic or ugly. That will be as it will be. But the influences which, in the last analysis, determine the naturalistic Weltanschauung are not the appeal of the beautiful or the pathetic, the tragic or the pleasing, but unprejudiced reason and empirical observation. The naturalist may or may not be a poet: but while he is investigating the nature of Reality he is bound to be a realist. He may be fond of poetry and he will be fond of knowledge.

Josef Pieper - Leisure, The Basis of Culture

Leisure cannot be realized so long as one understands it to be a means, even as a means to the end of "rescuing the culture of Christian Europe." The celebration of God's praises cannot be realized unless it takes place for its own sake.

Carl Sagan - Cosmos

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.