C

“The great mass of people are worthy of our respect.”
― Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

“In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

“If our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.”
― Karl R. Popper

“The trouble with religious morality comes not from morality's being inescapably pure, but from religion's being incurably unintelligible.”
― Bernard Williams, Morality