Phrases

"It is much more high and philosophical to discover things a priori than a posteriori. And therefore the Peripatetics have not been very solicitous to gather experiments to prove their doctrines, contenting themselves with a few only, to satisfy those that are not capable of a nobler conviction. And indeed they employ experiments rather to illustrate than to demonstrate their doctrines."

"A posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence, as with most aspects of science (evolution) and personal knowledge."

"A priori knowledge or justification is independent of experience, as with mathematics (2+2=4), tautologies ("All bachelors are unmarried"), and deduction from pure reason."

"Behold the mighty Dinosaur, Famous in prehistoric lore, Not only for his weight and strength But for his intellectual length. You will observe by these remains The creature had two sets of brains— One in his head (the usual place), The other at his spinal base. Thus he could reason a priori As well as a posteriori."

"There is nothing physical to be learned a priori. We have no right whatever to ascertain a single physical truth without seeking for it physically, unless it be a necessary consequence of other truths already acquired by experiment, in which case mathematical reasoning is alone requisite."

"New battles. - After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. - And we - we must still defeat his shadow as well!"

"The proper praise, hymn, and canticle of praise is namely this: by joyous and unconditional obedience to praise God when you cannot understand him. To praise him on the day everything goes against you, when everything goes black before your eyes, when others might readily want to demonstrate to you that there is no God – then, instead of becoming self-important by demonstrating that there is a God, humbly to demonstrate that you believe that there is a God, to demonstrate it by joyous and unconditional obedience – this is the hymn of praise."

"God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself."

"That the death of God appears to be an event that is now behind us and leaves us essentially indifferent is not atheism. It is nihilism. (chap. 6)"

"In spite of increasing production and comfort, man loses more and more the sense of self, feels that his life is meaningless, even though such a feeling is largely unconscious. In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead."

"Friedrich Nietzsche saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather."

"The death of God is the last event in the history of Christianity, but with the death of the Christian God all other gods die also. With the exposure of man's most universal horizon as mere horizon, all belief in eternal truths and beings becomes impossible. At the end of Part I of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra proclaims the death of all gods. The death of God is also the death of the Platonic ideas and of metaphysics. Traditional philosophies and traditional religions have shared a belief in a true world which they distinguished from the world known by man through his senses, the apparent world. Both philosophy and religion have been other-worldly. The impossibility of the belief in God is also the impossibility of the belief in a true world, but the abolition of the true world is also the abolition of the apparent world: the world known by man through his senses and feelings and through his whole being is now the only world and not the apparent world. Or, one could say that with the death of God the apparent world becomes the true and real world."

"With Nietzsche's saying that God is dead one arrives at the core of his philosophical endeavors. In Nietzsche's greatest book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra, who to some extent is the self-idealization of Nietzsche, asserts the death of God near the very beginning of the work. He does not at first prove that God is dead but makes it, as it were, a matter of personal honor that God be dead. The belief in God has become an indecency for all men except those who have had no opportunity to hear of the death of God...Nietzsche's atheism is historical atheism. The saying that God is dead implies that God once existed. God existed while one could believe in God; God is dead because belief in God has become impossible."

"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, 'How about the tortoise?' the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject.""

"Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was "rocks all the way down," he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should or on a series of shoulds "all the way down.""

"There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.'"

"Some ancient Asian cosmological views are close to the idea of an infinite regression of causes, as exemplified in the following apocryphal story: A Western traveler encountering an Oriental philosopher asks him to describe the nature of the world: “It is a great ball resting on the flat back of the world turtle.” “Ah yes, but what does the world turtle stand on?” “On the back of a still larger turtle.” “Yes, but what does he stand on?” “A very perceptive question. But it’s no use, mister; it’s turtles all the way down.”"

"My opponent's reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, "On a tortoise." But on what does the tortoise stand? "On another tortoise." With Mr. Barker, too, there are tortoises all the way down."

"If God exists, then arguments about him are arguments about the cosmos and of cosmic importance, but if he does not, they are not about anything. In that case, the important questions must be about human beings, and why, for instance, they ever believed that God existed. The issues about religious ethics are issues about the human impulses that expressed themselves in it, and they should be faced in those terms. For those who do not believe in a religious ethics, there is some evasion in continuing to argue about its structure: it distracts attention from the significant question of what such outlooks tell us about humanity. Nietzsche’s saying, God is dead, can be taken to mean that we should now treat God as a dead person: we should allocate his legacies and try to write an honest biography of him."

"Nietzsche knew of the ambiguity in all life. He knew of the creative and destructive elements which are always present in every life process. If you want to find out about his idea of God, do not look first to his statement that "God is dead." Read instead the last fragments of The Will to Power, which is a collection of fragments. It is not a book in itself. The last fragment describes the divine demonic character of life in formulations which show the ambiguity, the greatness, and the destructiveness of life. He asks us to affirm this life in its great ambiguity. Out of this he then has another kind of God, a God in which the demonic underground, the Dionysian underground, is clearly visible. The victory of the element of rationality or of meaning is not as clear as in other philosophers like Kant or Hegel, Hume or Locke, but there is an opening up of vitality, and its half-creative, half-destructive power."

"Christianity perishing by its morality. 'God is truth', 'God is love', 'the just God'. - The greatest event - 'God is dead' - felt obscurely. The German attempt to transform Christianity into a gnosis has burgeoned into the profoundest suspicion, with 'untruthfulness' felt most strongly (- against Schelling, e.g.)."

"Oh, where in the world has greater folly occurred than among the pitying? And what in the world causes more suffering than the folly of the pitying? Woe to all lovers who do not yet have an elevation that is above their pitying! Thus the devil once spoke to me: “Even God has his hell: it is his love for mankind.” And recently I heard him say these words: “God is dead; God died of his pity for mankind.” Thus I warn you against pity: from it a heavy cloud is coming to mankind! Indeed, I understand weather forecasting! But note these words too: all great love is above even all its pitying, for it still wants to create the beloved! “I offer myself to my love,and my neighbor as myself”–thus it is said of all creators. But all creators are hard. –Thus spoke Zarathustra."

"Indeed, with different eyes, my brothers, will I then seek my lost ones; with a different love will I love you then. And one day again you shall become my friends and children of a single hope; then I shall be with you a third time, to celebrate the great noon with you. And that is the great noon, where human beings stand at the midpoint of their course between animal and overman and celebrate their way to evening as their highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning. Then the one who goes under will bless himself, that he is one who crosses over; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at noon for him. ‘Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.’ – Let this be our last will at the great noon!” –"

"When Zarathustra had heard these words he took his leave of the saint and spoke: “What would I have to give you! But let me leave quickly before I take something from you!” – And so they parted, the oldster and the man, laughing like two boys laugh. But when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!” –"

"How to understand our cheerfulness. - The greatest recent event - that 'God is dead'; that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable - is already starting to cast its first shadow over Europe. To those few at least whose eyes - or the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some kind of sun seems to have set; some old deep trust turned into doubt: to them, our world must appear more autumnal, more mistrustful, stranger, 'older'. But in the main one might say: for many people's power of comprehension, the event is itself far too great, distant, and out of the way even for its tidings to be thought of as having arrived yet."

"The madman. - Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, 'I'm looking for God! I'm looking for God!' Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? - Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. 'Where is God?' he cried; 'I'll tell you! We have killed him - you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren't we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing at us? Hasn't it got colder? Isn't night and more night coming again and again? Don't lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposi­tion? - Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?"

"Elegant derivations from first principles — which often proved tractable only when applied to idealized situations — were of little value to the many colleagues who needed to fine-tune electronics components for maximum efficiency... Schwinger rearranged his equations in terms of measurable inputs and outputs, just as his engineering colleagues at the Rad Lab had done with real-world electronics. By recasting the calculation, Schwinger managed to calculate the effects of quantum fluctuations on the electron's energy levels and obtain an answer that matched Lamb's measurement to an extraordinary precision. As it turned out, Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga had accomplished the same goal a few years earlier. Tomonaga's work on radar during the war had proven similarly essential to his theoretical approach. This war-forged pragmatism produced enormously impressive research and influenced a generation of leading scientists... Anything that smacked of 'interpretation', or worse, 'philosophy', began to carry a taint for many scientists who had come through the wartime projects. Conceptual scrutiny of foundations struck many as a luxury. The wartime style was reinforced in the United States by exponentially rising university enrolments after the war. The new classroom realities left little space for informal discussion of philosophy or foundations. The Rad Lab rallying cry of “Get the numbers out” shaded into “Shut up and calculate!”"

"Thinking about foundations pays off in the long run. David Mermin once summarized a popular attitude towards quantum theory as “Shut up and calculate!”. We suggest an alternative slogan: “Shut up and contemplate!”"

"You can’t blame most physicists for following this ‘shut up and calculate’ ethos because it has led to tremendous develop­ments in nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid­ state physics and particle physics."

"I am not a supporter of Marxism, but I fully agree with this formulation. Another thing is that opium can sometimes be useful, and its use justified. For example, I envy believers. Indeed, I am 86 years old, I understand that death is close. And it can turn out to be painful, and no less painful are thoughts about the fate of loved ones. How good it would be to believe in the existence of, say, an afterlife, etc. But the mind is given to man in order to control his emotions and not engage in self-deception, belief in miracles."

"Optimism is the opium of the people."

"It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people."

"As we see it, a perhaps faulty presentation of the Christian message may have given the impression that religion is indeed the opiate of the people. And we would be guilty of betraying the cause of Peru's development, if we did not stress the fact that the doctrinal riches of the Gospel contain a revolutionary thrust."

"One cannot grasp freedom in faith without hearing simultaneously the categorical imperative: One must serve through bodily, social and political obedience the liberation of the suffering creation out of real affliction. ... Consequently, the missionary proclamation of the cross of the Resurrected One is not an opium of the people which intoxicates and incapacitates, but the ferment of new freedom. It leads to the awaking of that revolt which, in the "power of the resurrection" ... follows the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a being who labors and is heavily laden,"

"Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. ... Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"Gramsci's remarks are rich and stimulating, but in the last analysis they follow the classical Marxist pattern of analysing religion. Ernst Bloch was the first Marxist author who radically changed the theoretical framework—without abandoning the Marxist and revolutionary perspective. In a similar way to Engels, he distinguished two socially opposed currents: on one side the theocratic religion of the official churches, opium of the people, a mystifying apparatus at the service of the powerful; on the other the underground, subversive and heretical religion of the Albigensians, the Hussites, Joachim di Fiori, Thomas Münzer, Franz von Baader, Wilhelm Weitling and Leo Tolstoy."

"Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man."

"Alas! that ever Praise should have been what praise has been to me The opiate of the mind !"

"We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's hand book, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor in order."

"The colonialist bourgeoisie is aided and abetted in the pacification of the colonized by the inescapable powers of religion. All the saints who turned the other cheek, who forgave those who trespassed against them, who, without flinching, were spat upon and insulted, are championed and shown as an example."

"It is most absurd, therefore, to maintain, as some do, that religion was devised by the cunning and craft of a few individuals, as a means of keeping the body of the people in due subjection, while there was nothing which those very individuals, while teaching others to worship God, less believed than the of a God. I readily acknowledge, that designing men have introduced a vast number of fictions into religion, with the view of inspiring the populace with reverence or striking them with terror, and thereby rendering them more obsequious; but they never could have succeeded in this, had the minds of men not been previously imbued with that uniform belief in God, from which, as from its seed, the religious propensity springs."

"Children are simultaneously the victims of predators and vulnerable to exposure to dangerous images. All accompanied by the shrill cry of 'will no one think of the children?'"

"Movies subjected to the harshest cuts or outright banning during this early period were usually Italian- or American-made horror movies deemed too graphic in their portrayal of violence for sensible human consumption. They became known colloquially as the 'Video Nasties.' In modern-day language, it could be called the 'Hellen [sic] Lovejoy 'Think of the Children' Classification.'"

"This cry has been deftly and devastatingly parodied by The Simpsons since its debut in 1989, as the trademark of Helen Lovejoy, the parson's wife."

"The sentence 'how many kittens must die,' for example, could be delivered in the same histrionic, moralizing tone as Helen Lovejoy's signature line 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' on The Simpsons (1989-). Audiences laugh in response not because they despise kittens or children but because moral crusaders can be infuriatingly narrow in their interests as well as politically correct killjoys."

"Like Rev. Lovejoy’s wife, we do need to think of the children. However, we need to think of all the children. The existence of gay and lesbian parents is a fact, not ideology. Proponents of anti-gay laws may be trying to 'save the children,' but the ultimate effect of such laws is to harm the physical and psychological well-being of millions of children currently raised by loving GLBT parents."

"In 'The Simpsons,' one of my favorite characters is Rev. Lovejoy’s wife. Whenever the citizens of Springfield discuss any controversial issue, her immediate and hilariously shrill response is 'For heaven’s sake, would someone please think of the children?'"

"You could call it Lovejoy's Law: If, during an argument, someone begs you to ‘please think of the children,’ they’re probably . . . hoping to distract you from the worthlessness of their position. Because when we really care about the children, we don’t let people use them to manipulate us into accepting their politics. Instead, we engage in real debate."

"'Won’t somebody please think of the children!' That’s the first argumentative refuge of scoundrels, cheats and liars, and despite being satirized fairly comprehensively by Lovejoy’s character for well over a decade, it’s still a surprisingly common — and depressingly effective — tactic."

"'Won't someone think of the children?' is the constant refrain of Reverend Lovejoy's wife in the cartoon series The Simpsons. Whatever crisis or panic grips the citizens of Springfield, she places the children at the centre of attention. The child, for her, is an innocent and helpless victim in constant need of protection."