Philosophy Quotes

"I think, therefore I am... and I am because my community is."

"In African civilization, the person exists only in relation to others."

"The present moment contains all the wisdom of past and future."

"The intellectual is ultimately someone whose mind matters more to him than anything else."

"Humanism is the only universalism we have."

"One cannot deny the Orient, or rather, one can deny it only at enormous cost to oneself."

"Secular intellectuals are inevitably influenced by the religious background of their cultures."

"To speak of the human subject is to speak of someone caught in a web of relations and constraints."

"Secular humanism remains the highest achievement of human thought."

"Secular reasoning and ethical commitment must go hand in hand."

"The challenge of secular criticism is to remain humanistic without being naive."

"Language is not merely a tool for expressing ideas; it is itself a form of power."

"Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we construct to escape insupportable reality; in its basic trunk ideology is a fantasy construction which enables us to sustain unbearable reality."

"Only a Marxist analysis can explain the gap between reality and ideology."

"Cynicism is not the opposite of idealism, but its natural conclusion."

"The ultimate acid test of ideology is not the ideas themselves but what they make us do."

"We are all subjected to ideological mystification whether we admit it or not."

"The task of philosophy is not to solve problems but to dissolve them."

"The self is not a given but a constant construction."

"Action without reflection is mere reaction."

"To assume a culture is to assume a responsibility."

"We are responsible for our own becoming."

"Humanity is our common inheritance."

"Language is the home of being."

"Negritude is not a philosophy. It is both a way of life and a humanism made to measure for the Black man."

"Deconstruction is not destruction, but a careful reading of texts and their assumptions."

"The question of identity is never simple or singular in nature."

"We must learn to question the narratives that structure our understanding of progress."

"The intellectual must learn to inhabit the tensions between different ways of knowing."

"The other's alterity cannot be assimilated into familiar categories of understanding."