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"Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
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"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"

"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"

"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."

"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."

"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."

"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"

"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
Explore more quotes by Morris Raphael Cohen


"A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy."


"Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed."


"The method of exposition which philosophers have adopted leads many to suppose that they are simply inquiries, that they have no interest in the conclusions at which they arrive, and that their primary concern is to follow their premises to their logical conclusions."


"If a philosophic theory is once ruled out of court, no one can tell when it will appear again."


"The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic."


"Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability."


"Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability."
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