Only in pure logic and mathematics can statements be deemed absolutely certain, but for this kind of truth a stupendous price is paid. The price is that such statements say nothing about the world.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

…books about ethics are twice as likely to go missing from university libraries than other books – indicating that in some ways moral philosophy students may actually behave worse than other students!

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, “Oxygen was discovered,” misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

…in the wake of the deadliest war that the world had ever known one did not have to be a game theorist to favour preventing another – even by the brutal means of an atom-bombing campaign that left millions of Russians dead.

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future

I have individual subjects in whom apparent basic-need-gratification is compatible with “existential neurosis,” meaninglessness, valuelessness, or the like.

— Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature