Alexandre Dumas

in prosperity prayers seem but a mere assemblage of words, until the day when misfortune comes to explain to the unhappy sufferer the sublime language by which he invokes the pity of Heaven!

"...There are the learned and the knowing. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."
"But cannot one learn philosophy?"
"Philosophy is not to be learned; it is the combination of sciences acquired by the genius which applies them. Philosophy - it is the dazzling cloud on which Christ placed his foot to mount into the heavens."

- The Count of Monte Cristo

Cicero

Not until Burke would you see another defence of oligarchy at the expense of democracy phrased with undisguised class hatred like this. But I particularly like the bit on music: makes me think that if he were alive today he'd be a columnist for the Daily Fail. Try and read it in the disapproving tone of 'Mad' Mel Phillips, you'll see what I mean.

suppose in a shipwreck a stronger man sees a weaker man on a plank, will he not push him off to save himself, especially if there are no witnesses? If he doesn't, he will act justly but will foolishly throw away his own life. So, ... political justice is not justice but prudence; natural justice is indeed justice, but is at the same time folly.

- Paraphrase of The Republic III.29-31, reconstituted from Lactantius, Divine Institutiones 5.16.5-13

a state should be organised in such a way as to last forever. And so the death of a state is never natural, as it is with a person, for whom death is not only inevitable but also frequently desirable. Again, when a state is destroyed, eliminated, and blotted out, it is rather as if (to compare small with great) this whole world were to collapse and pass away.

- The Republic, III.34

SCIPIO: ... wherever there is a tyrant, one cannot say ... that there is a defective republic; logic now forces us to conlcude that there is no republic at all. ... a place totally controlled by a clique cannot properly be called a republic either ...When everything is supposed to be done under the people's control, when the masses punish whoever they please, when they seize, carry off, hold on to, or squander whatever they like, can you deny then, Laelius, that a republic exists, when everythinng belongs to the public? After all, our definition of a republic is "the property of the people'.
LAELIUS: Actually there is no state to which I should be quicker to refuse the name of republic than the one which is totally in the power of the masses. ... I don't see how there is any stronger case for applying the name of republic to a state enslaved by the mob. ... That rabble is just as tyrannical as one man, and all the more repellant in that there is nothing more monstrous than a creature which masquerades as a public and usurps its name. It is quite inconsistent that, when the property of the insane is placed by law in the hands of male relatives because the former [are no longer capable of managing it themselves, the property of the public should be left in the hands of an insane mob]

- The Republic, III.44-45

Nothing can so easily influence young and impressionable minds as the variety of vocal sounds. One can hardly express what enormous power that exerts for better or worse. ... I do notice how in theatres which once used to be filled with the agreeable plainness of Livius' and Naevius' tunes audiences now rock to and fro jerking their necks and eyes in time with the inflexions of the singer's voice. Ancient Greece used to punish that sort of thing very severely. It foresaw far in advance that the deadly plague, gradually creeping into the citizens' minds and infecting them with pernicious crazes and pernicious ideas, would suddenly bring about the collapse of entire states

Laws 2:38-40

Bertrand Russell

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

Why I Am Not a Christian

Wittgenstein

7.0 Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

3.333 The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and it cannot contain itself.

For let us suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument: in that case there would be a proposition 'F(F(fx))', in which the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings, since the inner one has the form φ(fx) and the outer one has the form ψ(φ(fx)). Only the letter 'F' is common to the two functions but the letter by itself signifies nothing.

This immediately becomes clear if instead of 'F(fu)' we write '(∃φ):F(φu).φu=Fu'.

That disposes of Russell's Paradox.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

109. ... Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.

- Philosophical Investigations I

Janet Downey

On Leibniz:

I haven't got past monads yet. They sound like shy secondary genital adornments.

Tom Paine

Still brilliant more than 200 years later, here's a wonderfully catty remark about Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man:

I know a place in America called Point-no-Point, because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke's language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke's three hundred and fifty-six pages.

On religion:

With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.