Strawson Quotes

#1. To ask to be forgiven is in part to acknowledge that the attitude displayed in our actions was such as might properly be resented and in part to repudiate that attitude for the future; and to forgive is to accept the repudiation and to forswear the resentment.

Peter Frederick Strawson

#2. The circumstance is the incredible part, but I always knew in my heart that something was going to be out there, just for the world to notice me. It sounds so cocky, but it's happening.

Kato Kaelin

#3. You know how I always believe in the future ... Without disorder, the revolution is impossible; knowing that, I did not lose hope, and I do not lose it now.

Peter Kropotkin

#4. If someone harmed or tortured or killed one of my children I'd feel everything almost anyone else would feel. I'd probably have intense feelings of revenge. But these feelings would fade. In the end they're small and self-concerned. Only the grief would last.

Galen Strawson

#5. Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.

P. F. Strawson

#6. Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.

Eckhart Tolle

#7. I've often felt that the Indian tiger has not been unleashed.

Ratan Tata

#8. It is true that 'I seem to see a table' does not entail 'I see a table'; but 'I seem to feel a pain' does entail 'I feel a pain'. So scepticism loses its force - cannot open up its characteristic gap - with regard to that which ultimately most concerns us, pleasure and pain.

Galen Strawson

#9. The question is one of faith. Faith in my talent. Faith in my decisions. And faith in the idea that the truth, even if it can't pay my bills, can still set me free.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#10. Free will is the thing you have to have if you're going to be responsible in this all-or-nothing way. That's what I mean by free will. That's what I think we haven't got and can't have.

Galen Strawson

#11. A red ganglion, no bigger than a scarlet thread, snapped and quivered; a nerve, no greater than a red linen fiber twisted. Deep in her one little mech was gone and the entire machine, imbalanced, was about to steadily shake itself to bits.

Ray Bradbury

#12. Sometimes we need to speak oddly to see clearly.

Galen Strawson

#13. I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.

Marilynne Robinson

#14. The way that Wall Street works is most people like very steady quarterly earnings, and they like to be very popular instead of unpopular and they don't like to be the nail that sticks up, as they say.

Christopher Galvin

#15. No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.

P. F. Strawson