Hobbes Quotes - Page 2

• Calvin: Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we can think faster than we speak? Hobbes: Probably so we can think twice.

  Bill Watterson

  Thinking, Talking, Speaking Up

  "There's Treasure Everywhere". Book by Bill Watterson, March 1996.

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• The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.

  Bill Watterson

  Reality, Issues, Special

  Bill Watterson (1995). “The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book”, p.11, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy... Let's go exploring!

  Bill Watterson

  Magic, World, Comic Strips

  "It's a Magical World". Book by Bill Watterson, October 1996.

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• About Thomas Hobbes: He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.

  John Aubrey

  Love, Truth, Years

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• I wonder where we go when we die?” “…Pittsburgh?” “You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?

  Bill Watterson

  Mean, Pittsburgh, Wonder

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• Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness". This was not a portrait of man "warts and all". It was all wart - except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.

  George Will

  Men, Self, Long

  George F. Will (1984). “Statecraft as Soulcraft”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• I am a super nostalgic person in general. I think part of the reason that I'm in the film business is because, to me, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, it seemed like the most appropriate career I could have where I knew I wouldn't have to kill the little kid in me. I get to play around, and that's amazing. There's a quote from Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes that I always found really interesting. He said, "Anyone who is nostalgic about their childhood never had one." And I always found it fascinating.

  Jordan Vogt-Roberts

  Kids, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.

  Dale Jamieson

  Animal, Self, Interest

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Government is founded not on force, as was the theory of Hobbes; nor on compact, as was the theory of Locke and of the revolution of 1688; nor on property, as was the assertion of Harrington. It springs from the necessities of our nature, and has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God.

  James Otis

  Spring, Government, Foundation

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• As "Calvin and Hobbes" went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity. One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what's going on in Calvin's head.

  Bill Watterson

  Writing, Reality, Drawing

  Source: www.annistonstar.com

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• We want everything in a hurry because our primary aim must be survival in the short term. Long term thinking has seemed like a luxury in human history because lives were shorter, but with our increased longevity we have to figure out what to DO with all our time, and to pace ourselves to achieve things that we want. Hobbes might have been right when he originally wrote that life is 'nasty, poor, brutish and short', but today we are AWASH with time.

  Tom Butler-Bowdon

  Thinking, Long, Survival

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.

  Hannah Arendt

  Strong, Order, Envy

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• As with Hobbes, we see again, the power of fiction. Rousseau's acount of natural man was no more real than Hobbes's, but following the same pattern, once it became the accepted story of human origins, it thereby exercised the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In imagining Rousseau to be right, we have become what Rousseau imagined.

  Benjamin Wiker

  Real, Men, Self

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• There's Hobbes, who understood in the 1640s that the sovereign is not an appointee of God, or even a figure of superior virtue and wisdom, but just a functional device whose role is to keep people from hurting and killing each other.

  Catherine Wilson

  Hurt, People, Roles

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It would be fun too to put some of the great philosophers and political scientists of the past couple centuries into a time machine, have them look at the world today, and see what they think. Imagine Schumpeter, Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, and more! That would be good fun.

  Scott D. Anthony

  Couple, Fun, Past

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Anti-Zionists, last of all, exhibit a distaste for certain words. It was Thomas Hobbes who, anticipating semantics, pointed out that words are counters, not coins; that the wise man looks through them to reality. This counsel many anti-Zionists seem to have neglected. They are especially disturbed by the two nouns nationalism and commonwealth, and by the adjective political. And yet these terms on examination are not at all upsetting.

  Milton Steinberg

  Wise, Men, Reality

  "The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow". Book by Gil Troy, 2018.

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• A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

  Alan Ryan

  Book, Two, People

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• In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.

  Steven Pinker

  Past, Data, Two

  "The Blank Slate". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

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• This a sacred rule we find
  Among the nicest of mankind,
  (Which never might exception brook
  From Hobbes even down to Bolingbroke,)
  To doubt of facts, however true,
  Unless they know the causes too.

  Charles Churchill

  Doubt, Might, Sacred

  Charles Churchill (1855). “The poetical works of Charles Churcill: With memoir, critical dissertation, and explanatory notes”, p.239

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• Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.

  Jonathan Swift

  War, States, Prove

  "On Poetry" l. 319 (1733)

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• I never felt ostracized or made to feel strange by obsessing over The Onion or Calvin and Hobbes. That was considered completely normal.

  Simon Rich

  Onions, Normal, Strange

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• I've always just loved drawing and loved cartoons. Growing up, I loved Disney films, I loved The Simpsons, and I was a big fan of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes and the way that they would have weird fantasy and then down-to-earth funny character comedy.

  Alex Hirsch

  Growing Up, Character, Drawing

  Source: collider.com

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• The fact is that philosophy has been a decisive source of inspiration in all the great crises that Europe has faced. It has been so in the time that preceded the fall of the Roman Empire, when Augustine of Hippo delineated the features of a new spiritual civilization; in the age of religious wars, when Descartes and Hobbes established the principles of modern science and politics; and at the turn of the French Revolution, interpreted by Kant and Hegel as an event destined to change the history of the world.

  Roberto Esposito

  Spiritual, Religious, Philosophy

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• The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Philosophy, Struggle, People

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1964). “A Martin Luther King Treasury”

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• "War," says Machiavelli, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

  Edmund Burke

  Peace, War, Military

  "A Vindication of Natural Society". Book by Edmund Burke, 1756.

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