Matthew Stewart Quotes

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Rationalism came to Islam pretty early and was rejected pretty early, and it was under the influence of Greek philosophy that it came

All great ideas are dangerous.

I wonder how it is that people's philosophies have come to spin faster than the changing seasons.

SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.

I love being a conservative. We conservatives are proud of our philosophy. Unlike our liberal friends, who are constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs and are in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic about our ideals.

All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

Our forefathers looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, before the world was enlightened by learning and philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the apprehensions of witchcraft, prodigies, charms, and inchantments. There was not a village in England that had not a ghost in it, the church-yards were all haunted, every large common had a circle of fairies belonging to it, and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit.

If You Want To Rebel Against Society, Don’t Dull The Blade

[Heraclitus had] a regal air of certainty.

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.

The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

I love this idea of being able to touch people with something quite familiar, something quite emotional, and at the same time, have the feeling that this is a new way of doing it, a fresh way of showing things. I like radical people. At the same time, I'm fascinated by popularity, people who were able to have huge success and also keep their consistency.

I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

Science, also, is most largely indebted to these beauty-loving Greeks, for truth is one form of loveliness.

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

Extreme liberalism is not a political philosophy. It is a mental disorder.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

Every new truth begins in a shocking heresy.