Society is unity in diversity.

As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot...

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

Warfare is an utterly stupid method of settling differences of interest between different nations.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be...

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited...

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception – that one perceives the world by perceiving one’s sense-data, or something like that.

What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.

Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I...

Strictly speaking, Natural Selection is not a cause at all, but is the mode of operation of a certain quite limited class of causes.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying...

Our cautious ancestors, when yawning, blocked the way to the entrance of evil spirits by putting their hands before their mouths. We find a reason for the gesture in the delicacy of manner which forbids...

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

There’s certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

It’s essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life’s pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can...

Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.

Although I’m Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point...

It’s okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers – they help us to learn.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

The accidental causes of science are only accidents relatively to the intelligence of a man.

There are clear cases in which “understanding” literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

I am said to be difficult of acquaintance, unwilling to meet any one half way, and showing a social manner which is easy, not diffident, but formal and unresponsive, tending constantly to hold people off.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a “neural correlate of consciousness”?

You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes...

We often attribute “understanding” and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

Ego is to the true self what a flashlight is to a spotlight.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations – human emotions – taking an intellectual form.

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.