Samantha Harvey Quotes

Socrates was executed … not for his megalomania or grandiose propositions or certitudes, but for stubbornly doubting the absolute truths of others.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

A Socrates in every classroom.

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

Non-violent extremism is essentially the increase of intolerant and bigoted demands made by groups seeking to dominate society.

If our hard-earned liberty, our desire to be irreverent of the old and to question the new, can be reduced to one, basic and indispensable right, it must be the right to free speech.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Never judge something by whether it is popular or not. You don't have to follow trends. No one thought William Wilberforce was right at first.

My profession is I'm a dissident philosopher.

Revolution starts in the mind. Question everything!

This is the age of the new tolerance and it is producing a bumper crop of anti-Christian and anti-American sentiment.

So then there was the Greek, Socrates, he was great... He invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone sort of went, ''Yeah, I suppose so.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Go back to classical times, say classical Greece. Who drank the hemlock? Was it someone who was conforming, obeying the gods? Or was it someone who was disrupting the youth and questioning the faith and belief? Socrates, in other words. It was Socrates.

Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outre.

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of the conflict between opinions.

The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance, freedom and openmindedness. Question: Isn't the real truth that they are intolerant of religion? They refuse to tolerate its importance in our lives.

Pure Christianity and serious godliness fear not the scrutiny of a free thought, but despise the impotent malice of a prejudiced one.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.

If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions, clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding.

It is at the cross-roads that skepticism is born, not in a hermitage.