T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something I can't understand or subscribe to.”
“The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true, inner selves and the outside world is pervasive, but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.”
“The idea that there is one kind of African is of course ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue for example that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.”
“The idea that there is only one way to be reconciled with God has its origins in the Old Testament.”
“The idea that there is something necessarily wrong with circular logic is itself a logical fallacy. If there is nothing wrong with the starting premises then the conclusions are necessarily correct too. In fact, only circular logic can be correct. Only such logic can offer total holistic coherence and analytic closure, i.e. perfect tautology – provided it is the correct circular logic, which means it must have the correct starting premise: the PSR itself.”
Source: Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality
“The idea that there will be something spiritual or subtle, some sort of consciousness that can escape the collapse of the body and brain, is not very credible in the modern scientific worldview.”
“The idea that they were going to have to-eventually-go someplace that was even hotter than this was now was worrying Harrier, but there wasn't much he could do about it at the moment. He couldn't imagine why anybody would want to live here if they had a choice. Sometimes, he thought, people were idiots.”
Source: The Phoenix Endangered
“The idea that things intrinsically were just better is so stupid to me because they never were. It's all relative.”
“The idea that things used to be better is fantasy. It's putting a halo on something that no one can disprove.”
“The idea that this end of philosophy— at least, of political philosophy and (I claim) moral philosophy— has close relations with history overlaps with a more ambitious view held by a consistently underestimated Oxford philosopher, R. G. Collingwood. The trouble with Collingwood’s kind of commitment is that it requires one to know some history. My two associates in the view I am sketching are Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. They are both Roman Catholics, though of different sorts. I used to find this a disquieting fact but no longer do so. All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt respectively the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. In any case, we all assume some historical commitments, they on a more ambitious scale than I, and perhaps there is a rather nervous competition for who writes the most irresponsible history.”
“The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians.”
“The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians... The 'worship' growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself - a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks.”
“The idea that those who have so much and those who have so little can grow together is a pathetic illusion. As the former becomes richer, the latter becomes poorer. Wealth is not absolute; it is relative. Everyone pretends to be unaware of this, but deep down, they must know it's true. That's why they deceive and harm others, plunder from them, clinging desperately to the exclusivity that ranks them 'winners.' What on earth are they doing? A world where the corpses of countless poor lie beneath a handful of monstrous victors. They call this horrendous barbarism 'freedom.' Read the banner. It says 'self.”
Source: The Cat Who Saved the Library
“The idea that those who have so much and those who have so little can grow together is a pathetic illusion. As the former becomes richer, the latter becomes poorer. Wealth is not absolute; it is relative. Everyone pretends to be unaware of this, but deep down, they must know it's true. That's why they deceive and harm others, plunder from them, clinging desperately to the exclusivity that ranks them 'winners.' What on earth are they doing? a world where the corpses of countless poor lie beneath a handful of mostrous victors. They call this horrendous barbarism 'freedom.' Read the banner. It says 'self.”
Source: The Cat Who Saved the Library
“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“The idea that trials are a search for the truth is just a myth. Trials are a search for that which the jury will believe is the truth.”
Source: One Dog Night: An Andy Carpenter Novel
“The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.”
“The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule.”
“The idea that vaccines are a primary cause of autism is not as crackpot as some might wish. Autism's 60-fold rise in 30 years matches a tripling of the US vaccine schedule.”
“The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.”
“The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin cells a minute?”
“The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant, considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it's extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life.”
“The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. It's a belief we want to be true. Forfeiting solitude and independence is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize. Sharing a habitat, a life, is for sure harder than being alone. In fact, coupled living seems virtually impossible, doesn't it? To find another person to spend all your life with, to age with and change with, to see every day, to respond to their moods and needs?”
Source: I'm Thinking of Ending Things
“The idea that we are our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper. That we should treat others as we would want to be treated. And that we care for the sick... feed the hungry... and welcome the stranger... no matter where they come from, or how they practice their faith.”
“the idea that we are
so capable of love
but still choose
to be toxic”
Source: Milk and honey
“The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.”
“The idea that we are the persistent seekers of the truth and nothing but the truth, and that this truth can save us or set us free is one of the strongest and most pervasive fallacies in our species through the millenia.”
“The idea that we can actually have an impact on places more or less instantly, too, by responding in some way or not responding, I think, also makes it true.”
“The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.”
Source: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
“The idea that we can have a new life form, what does it say about the zoo's main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animal can have the same attraction to people?”
“The idea that we can operate in different times is very important for me. And it manifests in daily life or when you meditate. In a way, it's a very scientific thing that you experience for yourself, how time passes, how your body can react to time in different ways.”
“The idea that we can take this lump of clay and mold it into a form of our choosing is absolutely ludicrous.”
“The idea that we cause harm by doing what we perceive to be the right thing, that's another theme that interests me. Because most people don't intend to cause harm, they cause harm by doing the right thing - in their mind.”
“The idea that we could have a child who escapes from the confines of the adult world and goes somewhere where he has power, both literally and metaphorically, really appealed to me.”
“The idea that we criminalize fellow human beings based on optics, based on the need to progress in politics and gain power, and for economic reasons and financial reasons, for financial gains, and we throw out humanization for criminalization.”
“The idea that we evolved with these thoughts is actually very fascinating - to me.”
“The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.”
“The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species-and humans in past social regimes-is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible.”
“The idea that we live in a post-modern culture is a myth. In fact a post-modern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. Nobody is a post-modernist when it comes to reading the labels on a medicine bottle versus a box of rat poison! You better believe that texts have objective meaning!”
“The idea that we must choose between the method of "winning hearts and minds" and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.”
Source: Chomsky On Anarchism
“The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.”
“The idea that we, our fathers and mothers, might be proud, hard-working and intelligent people doing something worthwhile, or even admirable, seemed to be beyond her. For a woman who saw success as being demonstrated through education, ambition, adventure and conspicuous professional achievement, we must have seemed a poor sample. I don't think anyone ever mentioned "university" in this school; no one wanted to go anyway - people that went away ceased to belong; they changed and could never really come back, we knew that in our bones. Schooling was a "way out", but we didn't want it, and we'd made our choice. Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of "going somewhere" and "doing something with your life". The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn't count for much.”
Source: The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
“The idea that we possess a true self serves a hugely important psychological purpose. If we have an essential and unchanging identity, one we are destined to discover sooner or later, then the beliefs we hold, the choices we make, the person we become—none of this happens by chance. Instead, the entire course of our lives is inevitable, dictated by the certainty that our real self will eventually surface.”
Source: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
“The idea that we sacrifice our innate wisdom at the feet of our Guides is really no different from the rigid religious doctrines that talked us out of our childhood spiritual knowing.”
Source: Life Betwixt: Essays on Allies in the Everyday and Shamanism Among
“The idea that we should be open to all ideas is very different from the supposition that all ideas are equally valid.”
“The idea that we should check on our unreflective belief acquisition sounds great, but we need to know whether the processes of reflection which we put to work serves to improve our reliability or not.”
“The idea that we would raise billions of sentient animals, treat them horribly, pollute our waterways with their waste, compromise the effectiveness of our antibiotics so that they grow faster, and then slaughter them with little regard to their suffering so that we can feed off their corpses, will seem to most people unthinkably cruel and barbarous - sort of in the way that we think of medieval punishments, or Europeans today think of the death penalty.”
“The idea that we're somehow centrally important to the planet's existence is pretty comical - although I'd like us to be.”
“The idea that we've outgrown ends up limiting us and we have to make a choice about what we're going to do in our lives.”
“The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.”