Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.

It takes time and effort and preparation to think. Statesmen are far too busy making speeches to think.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

A state would be happy where philosophers were kings or kings were philosophers.

It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interest of the country.

For [Donald] Trump, popularity equals truth... He understands that in American public discourse, it's hard to say the people are wrong.

If you find the light of Scripture clearer than the light of reason (which also is given us by divine wisdom), you are doubtless right in your own conscience in making your reason yield. For my part, since I plainly confess that I do not understand the Scriptures, though I have spent many years upon them, and since I know that when once I have a firm proof I cannot by any course of thought come to doubt of it, I rest wholly upon that which my understanding commends to me, without any suspicion that I am deceived therein, or that the Scriptures, even though I do not search them, can speak against it. For one truth cannot conflict with another.

The basis of Ronald Reagan was his humanity. I might not have agreed with his politics, but my research - all I read about him and by him - was that he was revered because he had a big heart. He was very religious and sincere. He believed that one spoke truths because, otherwise, people would know you were lying. None of that even applies to Trump.

I believe in professionalism, less in politicians.

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.

We're philosophers. We think, therefore we am.

Brothers and sisters: Now is not the time for thinking small, now is not the time for the same-old, same-old establishment politics and stale inside-the-Beltway ideas.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.

I don't think George Bush is a good president by any imagination, but when he said, 'If you're talking to Al-Quaeda, we want to know what it's about,' it just proves one thing: If you're president long enough, you will one day say something that is true.

I have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach that Gandhi is advocating.

I think that [Jay] Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf.

I have this insane optimistic streak that the American people prevail over the stupidity that the leadership exhibits time and time again, and I think that's the truth.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.