119 Philosophical Quotes To Ponder

Philosophy has long been the cornerstone of human introspection, prompting us to ponder the meaning of existence, ethics, and the universe. Whether you're delving into the wisdom of ancient thinkers or modern-day philosophers, these reflections offer profound insights into the human condition. To stimulate your intellect and spark deep conversations, we've compiled a curated collection of the top 119 philosophical quotes. From the musings of Socrates to the contemplations of Nietzsche, these quotes are sure to inspire and challenge your worldview. So, sit back, reflect, and delve into the rich tapestry of thought that has shaped human understanding across the ages.

1. “The decay of Logic results from an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.” - C.S. Lewis

2. “When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.” - C.S. Lewis

3. “Avoid loud and aggressive persons,they are vexations to the spirit.” - Max Ehrmann

4. “Were knowledge all, what were our needTo thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?” - Christopher Brennan

5. “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” - Kurt Vonnegut

6. “Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.” - Victor Hugo

7. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

8. “آری تنها یک مسئله‌ی اساسی مطرح است:تشخیص سایه‌ی وجود از اصل وجود” - علامه طباطبایی

9. “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” - Bertrand Russell

10. “You can dance. You can make me laugh.You've got x-ray eyes. You know how to sing. You're a diplomat. You've got it all. Everybody loves you. You can charm the birds out of the sky, But I, I've got one thing. You always know just what to say And when to go, But I've got one thing. You can see in the dark, But I've got one thing: I loved you better. Last night I woke up,Saw this angel. He flew in my window. And he said, Girl, pretty proud of yourself, huh?" And I looked around and said, Who me?" And he said, "The higher you fly, the faster you fall."He said, "Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall, Gravity's rainbow. Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall, Gravity's Angel.” - Laurie Anderson

11. “Hope is the privilege of the weak.” - Gasmaskman

12. “It's best to locate the mind first before launching the 'missiles of contention'.” - Gasmaskman

13. “The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.” - Benny Bellamacina

14. “Where is that man who has forgotten words that I may have a word with him?” - Chuang Tsu

15. “I look back now and realize that the gift of a true friend is that she sees you not the way you see yourself or the way others see you. A true friend sees you for who you are and who you can become.” - Robin Jones Gunn

16. “Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.” - Euripides

17. “That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.” - W.E.H. Lecky

18. “The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.” - Isobelle Carmody

19. “There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. ” - Virginia Woolf

20. “A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches” - Jeff Lindsay

21. “I never thought it would be easy to serve God," she said. "I just didn't think it would be this hard.” - Frank Herbert

22. “I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.” - Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

23. “De atunci femeia-ascunde sub pleoape-o taina si-si misca geana parc-ar zice ca ea stie ceva, ce noi nu stim, ce nimenea nu stie , nici Dumnezeu chiar.” - Lucian Blaga

24. “The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.” - Albert Camus

25. “People are not measured by their accomplishments, but by how many times they screw up trying to achieve them.” - James McGregor

26. “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.” - George Orwell

27. “My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church. In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.” - Italo Calvino

28. “We spend so much time creating a façade of what we want to project to the world, we almost forget what we ourselves are truly about in the process.” - Jason R. Thrift

29. “As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which cloud forever and shadows form, dreams persisted; and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if you questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumph, happiness prevails, order rules, or to resist the extra ordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure. Moreover softened and acquiescent, the spring with their bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloud about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and fights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.” - Virginia Woolf

30. “What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.” - Virginia Woolf

31. “We Are The Sum Total Of Our Choices...” - Woody Allen

32. “The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.” - Yann Martel

33. “Work on your character, let life fall into place.” - Sonia Rumzi

34. “Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.” - Epicurus

35. “For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.” - Christopher Isherwood

36. “philosophy is not suited for the masses, what they need is holiness.” - Nietzsche/Friedrich

37. “For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.” - Moses Maimonides

38. “Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?” - Vikram Seth

39. “Devil-boy Jack: "A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back."Thaniel Fox: "There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of."Devil-boy Jack: "I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.” - Chris Wooding

40. “The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.” - George Bataille

41. “If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.” - Jules Verne

42. “If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a correspondence bewteen the measure of individual elements and the appearance of the work as a whole.” - Vitruvius

43. “Don´t count the days. Make the days count.” - ali

44. “Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.” - Steven Erikson

45. “If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

46. “Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.Socrates: How so, Plato?Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is asculptor.Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they haveno need to be reminded.Plato: That is correct.Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

47. “Life has taught me one supreme lesson. This is that we must—if we are really to live at all, if we are to enjoy the life more abundant promised by the Sages of Wisdom—we must put our convictions into action. My remuneration has been that I have been privileged to act out my faith.” - Margaret Sanger

48. “The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.” - Russell Hoban

49. “The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

50. “The only thing standing between you and your dreams is ... reluctance.” - Carroll Bryant

51. “Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures.” - Milan Kundera

52. “Omnia mundi creaturaquasi liber et pictura nobis estin speculum.” - Umberto Eco

53. “Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” - Patrick O'Brian

54. “By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.” - Georg Simmel

55. “We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.” - Rae Armantrout

56. “Listen." Jennifer reverted, "I didn't mean anything by all of that before. I understand what you were trying to do and ..." She struggled for the right words. "Sweetie, like love, people don't live inside of life, life lives inside of you. Open yourself up to it and there's no stopping your heart.” - Carroll Bryant

57. “I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?” “Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.” - Plato

58. “Life is like a box of cookies: it's good while it lasts, but before you know it, it's gone.” - R.M. ArceJaeger

59. “Luck is often just skill expressing itself without the brain’s consent.” - R.M. ArceJaeger

60. “God is like a search engine — He is willing to answer your requests, but you must ask Him the right questions.” - R.M. ArceJaeger

61. “Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.” - Roald Dahl

62. “Without a whole lot of pressure, a diamond is just a piece of coal.” - Miriam Darnell

63. “Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.” - Don DeLillo

64. “Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be.” - Carroll Bryant

65. “Some people remember the sixties better than others do. Some weren't even there, some who were there were not really there, and some who were not really there were "really there".” - Tom Hays

66. “It is the darkness that makes the light visible, and not the other way around.” - Nancy Venable Raine

67. “Heated is what you get when you rub faith and instinct together.” - Cornelia DeDona

68. “Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel wenn ein Affe hineinsieht so kann kein Apostel heraus gucken.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

69. “Truths are as much a matter of questions as answers.” - Ozzie Zehner

70. “There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness” - Sophocles

71. “Are you dying?"Cato lit his cigarette. "It's not acute, perhaps, but we're all dying, Harry.” - Jo Nesbø

72. “I don't reckon misery loves any damn thing at all.” - Bruce Machart

73. “He who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.” - Confucius

74. “I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?” - E.A. Bucchianeri

75. “There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.” - Mark Helprin

76. “That's a stupid question,' said Malachi. 'Because he didn't warn him. He didn't warn anyone.''No, it's a philosophical question,' Kearns corrected him. 'Which makes it useless, not stupid.” - Rick Yancey

77. “... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

78. “Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

79. “Not knowing is not a problem, not wondering is.” - Chase Weir

80. “It all begins with goodness in the heart.” - Bjorn Street

81. “Without the quest, there can be no epiphany.” - Constantine E. Scaros

82. “Evil is done by the living.” - Heather Graham

83. “The truth was always out there, you just had to find it.” - Heather Graham

84. “Jace turned to look over his shoulder, the wind whipping his hair into tangles. "What are you thinking?" he called back to her."Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see.""Everything down there is exactly the same," he said. "You're the one that's different.” - Cassandra Clare

85. “What are you thinking?""Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see.""Everything down there is exactly the same," he said. "You're the one that's different.” - Cassandra Clare

86. “What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring?What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?” - Philip K. Dick

87. “In the strange dreams of man, there are stories that are unknowingly being built by them. Mine are among the billions that remain untold.” - Brandon Benevides

88. “Maybe they were born of karma, their own or their parents', Zack thought; maybe the universe had a purpose for them, and they were what they were because the world needed them to be that way.” - Jackie Trippier Holt

89. “No evil being was ever wise: they are all against every wise man's critics.” - A Gentlemen

90. “Things aren't different. Things are things.” - William Gibson

91. “Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.” - C.G. Jung

92. “There are no endings, only beginnings that have been reborn.” - Little Tiger and the Year of the Dragon D. Byron Patterson

93. “Often times, "shame" is the word that best describes reality.” - Carroll Bryant

94. “Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.” - Victor Hugo

95. “Over and over again I have said that there is no way out of the present impasse. If we were wide awake we would be instantly struck by the horrors which surround us ... We would drop our tools, quit our jobs, deny our obligations, pay no taxes, observe no laws, and so on. Could the man or woman who is thoroughly awakened possibly do the crazy things which are now expected of him or her every moment of the day?” - Henry Miller

96. “When there's a monster under your bed sometimes it really is best not to look.” - Jocelynn Drake

97. “Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free.” - Daniel Delgado F

98. “Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” - Plato

99. “(Speaking about ponies engaging in a game of running around and chasing a ball with "imaginary riders")Along with everything else about it, it seemed to be a parable for life. Going forwards and backwards and round in circles, striving ever forward only to have to run like crazy backwards to get the ball again, realizing that your enemy is after the same goal and you're actually helping him toward it and getting roughed up and possibly killed while you're at it but still feeling the comradeship of being in the game all together.” - Susan Trott

100. “Love is the unification of two equal opposites to create new love." ~ Amunhotep El Bey” - Amunhotep El Bey

101. “And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them -- like 'em better sometimes.” - Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle

102. “... the lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

103. “A lot of things should have been, Zigmund, but they aren’t. Are you going to be miserable about the things you cannot change, or do something about the things you can?” - Melika Dannese Lux

104. “Yesterday I thought about why I felt the need to get up at exactly the same time as the day before and do everything I did the day before. Why? What compels any of us to do the things we do when deep down a part of us just wants to break free from it all?” - J.A. Redmerski

105. “While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in.silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.” - John Steinbeck

106. “In Unity we can be enslaved, and in Unity we can also come together as individuals." Old Woman” - Eleni Papanou

107. “Knowing you don't have much time left changes things. You get kind of philosophical. And you figure things out-more like, they figure themselves out-and everything gets real clear.” - Kami Garcia

108. “Many feel that writers are a dime a dozen, so the goal is to break through and make it to the value of a penny.” - Wil Zeus

109. “ I always see the light at the end of the tunnel before I enter the cave” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

110. “The best way to move forward is to stop” - Benny Bellamacina

111. “I charge thee, fling away ambition. By that sin fell the angels.” - William Shakespeare

112. “There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

113. “We all have our safe places, where none are invited. They are lonely rooms full of the musk of memory. Sanctuary rather than adventure.” - Basith

114. “All these mirrorscarnival distortionsof selves we never were.” - Basith

115. “إذا كان الوضع الذي ساد في عالم الإسلام لترتيب العلاقة بين العقل والنقل; وأعني بالكيفية التي ظل معها العقل تابعا لسلطة النقل علي نحو شبه كامل, هو ما يؤسس لهذا التصور الغالب عن قصور العقل واحتياجه, فإن أصل هذا الوضع لا يرتد- علي عكس ما يتبادر سريعا للذهن- إلي الإسلام نفسه, بل إنه يجد ما يؤسسه كاملا في قلب الثقافة السابقة عليه, والتي يبدو- وللمفارقة- أن الإسلام قد قصد إلي زحزحة وإزاحة نظامها الكلي, علي الرغم من إدماجه لبعض عناصرها الجزئية في صميم بنائه. فإنه إذا كان التحليل يكشف عن أن من قاموا علي صياغة التيار الغالب في ثقافة الإسلام( الذين يتناسلون في سلالة ممتدة من علماء الأصول الكبار من مثل الشافعي وابن حنبل والأشعري والباقلاني والجويني والغزالي وابن تيمية وغيرهم) قد كرسوا تبعية- تتفاوت حدودها- من العقل للنقل, فإنه يبدو- وللغرابة- أن الترتيب الذي كرسه هؤلاء المؤسسون الكبار للعلاقة بين العقل والنقل, يمثل انحرافا عن ترتيب العلاقة بينهما الذي ينبني عليه فعل الوحي ذاته; وهو الفعل المؤسس للإسلام كدين.” - علي مبروك

116. “وبالرغم من هذا الاتفاق بين إصلاحيي القرن التاسع عشر ودعاة هذه الأيام التليفزيونيين, في قراءة أزمة التأخر العربي بعامل الابتعاد عن الإسلام, فإنه يبقي أن قراءة كل منهما لتلك الظاهرة تختلف عن قراءة الآخر لها علي نحو كامل. وللمفارقة فإن القراءة الإصلاحية, القادمة من القرن التاسع عشر, لهذه الظاهرة, كانت أكثر وعيا واستنارة من القراءة الراهنة التي يقدمها دعاة هذه الأيام لها. إذ فيما يلح دعاة هذه الأيام علي تفسير ابتعاد الناس عن الإسلام بالميل المتأصل في نفوسهم إلي الهوي; وعلي النحو الذي يترتب عليه ضرورة زجرهم وقمعهم, فإن رجل الإصلاح قد ألح, في المقابل, علي مسئولية الاستبداد الكبري في إبعاد الناس عن جوهر الإسلام. ومن هنا فإن رجل الإصلاح لم يكن أكثر فهما فقط, بل وكان أكثر جرأة وشجاعة من شيوخ هذه الأيام البؤساء; الذين لا يفعل الواحد منهم- للأسف- إلا أن يكون معينا للمستبد في السيطرة علي المحكومين.” - علي مبروك

117. “إن الأطلقة( كآلية تفكير تسود فضاء التفكير العربي من دون تمييز بين تراثي وحداثي)- وليس سواها- هي ما يحيل تجارب البشر من تاريخ حي إلي نص أو أصل جامد يقف خارجه; علي النحو الذي يكون معه أشبه بالشاهد المصمت المعلق علي قبر صاحبه, والذي لا يعرف الخلف اللاحق إلا التعبد في ظلاله. وتلك هي جوهر الممارسة السلفية; علي أن يكون معلوما أن هذه الممارسة لا تقف عند حدود من يقال أنهم سلفيو هذا الزمان, بل تتجاوزهم إلي من يقال أنهم حداثيوه أيضا. و سواء مورست هذه الأطلقة, تحت يافطة الدين أو العلمانية, فإنها تمثل خطراً داهماً علي الدولة.” - علي مبروك

118. “تدرك السياسة, وخصوصاً حين تكون قامعة مستبدة، أن العقل المنفتح غير المقيد هو أخطر ما يتهددها؛ وذلك من حيث يؤشر علي أن نقيضها من الحكم الرشيد هو المؤدي- وليس سواه- إلي تحقيق صالح المجموع، ومن هنا ما تسعي إليه، علي الدوام، من إزاحته وإبعاده.وإذ تدرك استحالة إنجاز هذا الإنجاز بما تمتلك من وسائل الترويع والبطش، فإنها تتوسل بالدين والشرع لتضعهما في مواجهة معه، وللغرابة، فإن ذلك لا ينتهي إلي إسكات صوت العقل فحسب، بل إلي تهديد منظومتي الدين والشرع علي نحو كامل.” - علي مبروك

119. “You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.” - Philip K. Dick