David Berlinski Quotes

Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.

"Young men wish always to dream of what they have lost." "And old men?" "Of what they have not found."

Some philosophers see into themselves, and some into their times; still others forge an alliance with the future.

Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.

I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.

Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

In the end, every scheme and every science is justified by itself or it is not justified at all.

The motion of the mind is conveyed along a cloud of meaning.~ There is this paradox that we get to meaning only when we strip the meaning from symbols.

However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.