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Thomas Hobbes Quotes

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"Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly."

"Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy."

"Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues."
Politics

"Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation."

"The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns."

"As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body."

"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain."

"That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself."

"A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life."

"In the state of nature profit is the measure of right."

"No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it."

"Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves."

"Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another."

"The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only."

"War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known."

"The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living."

"Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto."

"A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous."

"Curiosity is the lust of the mind."

"Desire to know why, and how - curiosity, which is a lust of the mind, that a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge - exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure."

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