The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

Be mindful of the link between action and outcome. Ask yourself: If I repeat today's action 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?

I like my cinema gritty, I like my eggs gritty.

You can't teach someone to be enlightened. It's something you have to go and do. You can't teach someone to meditate well. It's something you have to go and do.

By common consent, gray hairs are a crown of glory: the only object of respect that can never excite envy.

One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle.

I think that when something ends there's something new starting.

To end slavery, you must overcome the mental and physical inertia of the masses and quicken their intelligence and creative faculty.

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

Print and web have profoundly different effects: The effect is immediate when people can click on links.