Hume Quotes - Page 2

• And where else will [Hume,] this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an individual of that minority?

  Thomas Jefferson

  Son, Men, Democracy

  Thomas Jefferson, Jean M. Yarbrough (1963). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.261, Hackett Publishing

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• Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn't call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope, very often, pure banalities in this jargon

  Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

  Jargon, Envelopes, Way

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• "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Self, Independence, Mind

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• I had no idea what philosophy was until I went to college at UBC. I first read Hume and Plato, so naturally I was under the misapprehension that philosophers are trying to figure out what is true, and that contemporary philosophers are mainly trying to figure out what is true about the mind. Of course Hume and Plato were trying to do that, hence my misapprehension.

  Patricia Churchland

  Plato, Philosophy, College

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

  Patricia Churchland

  Psychology, Alive, World

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Doctrine, Delicacy, Matter

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• Moral theory develops from the divine command theory of medieval Christian philosophy, mixed up with a bit of ancient pagan virtue theory, to the purely secular moral sentiment and interpersonal reaction theories of Smith and Hume, to Kant's attempt to restore command theory but with something supersensible in the individual rather than God as the source of authority.

  Catherine Wilson

  Christian, Philosophy, Moral

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In fact, I think it was the philosopher Hume who argued that it's far more likely that a miracle is a new physical phenomenon that we have yet to discover and have now discovered in that moment than it is a spiritual force coming down from God making something happen in front of you.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Spiritual, Thinking, Miracle

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• As the capacity to coerce declines, it is natural to turn to control of opinion as the basis for authority and domination - a fundamental principle of government already emphasized by David Hume.

  Noam Chomsky

  Government, Principles, Fundamentals

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

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• Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume.

  Ann Coulter

  Faces, Claims, Democrat

  "No Wonder They're Afraid of Brit Hume" by Ann Coulter, townhall.com. May 3, 2007.

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• Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings.

  Sidney Hook

  Philosophical, Writing, Color

  Sidney Hook (1987). “Out of step: an unquiet life in the 20th century”, Harpercollins

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• Jefferson, Madison and many others taught that complex laws and codes were sure signs of oppression. They agreed with Montesquieu, Lock and Hume and that laws must be simple....and indeed that the entire legal code must be simple enough that every citizen knows the entire law. If a person doesn't know the law....he shouldn't be held liable for breaking it or freedom is greatly reduced.

  Oliver DeMille

  Simple, Law, Locks

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• I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Thinking, Ideas, Purpose

  Source: denisdutton.com

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• In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .

  Philip K. Dick

  Philosophy, Law, Gunpowder

  "To The High Castle: Philip K. Dick: A Life 1928-1962". Book by Gregg Rickman, 1989.

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• An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Design, Waiting

  "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design". Book by Richard Dawkins, September 28, 2015.

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• Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Happiness, Girl, Mean

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.87, Harvard University Press

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• I would guess it didn't exactly represent a profile in courage for the vice president to wander over there to the F-word network for a sit down with Brit Hume. I mean, that's a little like Bonnie interviewing Clyde, ain't it?

  Jack Cafferty

  Mean, President, Vices

  "Journalists Jealous Cheney Went to FNC, Take Shots at Integrity of FNC & Brit Hume" by Brent Baker, www.newsbusters.org. February 16, 2006.

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• Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.

  Noam Chomsky

  Gun, Hands, Doe

  Source: chomsky.info

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