Philistines Quotes - Page 3

• When temptation comes your way, name that boastful, deceitful giant “Goliath!” and do with it as David did to the Philistine of Gath.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Names, Temptation, Giants

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• It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

  Karl Marx

  Religious, Water, Political

  Karl Marx (2018). “The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings: & Selected Writings”, p.11, Pan Macmillan

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• The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plow while armies march across his fields.

  Ernst Junger

  Dream, Army, Sacrifice

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• I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.

  Quentin Crisp

  Years, Age, Rooms

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 12, 1968.

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• Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

  Allan Bloom

  Men, Differences, Humanity

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.

  John Carroll

  Hero, Winning, Boys

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• It has been wisely said, "that well may thy guardian angel suffer thee to lose thy locks, when thou darest wilfully to lay thy head in the lap of temptation!" Was it not easier for the hero of Judaea to avoid the touch of the fair Philistine, than to elude her power when held in her arms?

  Jane Porter

  Hero, Angel, Temptation

  Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”, p.19

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• [There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

  William James

  Responsibility, World, Paganism

  William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.128, Harvard University Press

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• It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting.

  Felicity Huffman

  Kids, Italian, Makeup

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• With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

  Leon Trotsky

  Order, Class, Giving

  Leon Trotsky (1935). “The defence of terrorism: terrorism and communism; a reply to Karl Kautsky”

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