Q - Thomas Hobbes
Posted on 23rd January 2021
Thomas Hobbes 1588 - 1679 was an English philosopher, often considered to be the founder of political philosophy.
He is best known for his 1651 book ‘Leviathan’ which has served as the foundation for later Western political philosophy.
‘A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life’
‘All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called ‘Facts’. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain’
‘When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death’
‘Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy’
‘The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone’
‘It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law’
‘There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense’
‘Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues’
‘Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter’
‘The privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject, but man only’
‘I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts’
‘The right of nature… is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life’
‘They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that disliked, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion’
‘Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion’
‘Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all’
‘Curiosity is the lust of the mind’
‘Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation’
‘I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’
‘Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another’
‘He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy’
‘Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech’
‘No man’s error becomes his own Law; nor oblige him to persist in it’
‘The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns’
‘Words are the counters of wise men… and the money of fools’
‘The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living’
‘I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark’
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