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If the end of education is to foster the love of truth, this love cannot be presupposed in the means. The means must rather be based on a resourceful pedagogical rhetoric that, knowing how initially resistant or impervious we all are to philosophic truth, necessarily makes use of motives other than love of truth and of techniques other than “saying exactly what you mean.” That is why, for example, the earlier, classical tradition of rationalism recognized the inescapable need to speak in philosophical poems and dialogues as well as treatises.

— Arthur Melzer

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More quotes by Arthur Melzer

The philosophic life—the radically personal effort to see life whole—can never be genuinely pursued as a collective enterprise of specialists.

One cannot philosophize in public any more than one can make love there.

Only a person fully in touch with the irrational temptations buried within him has a chance of becoming genuinely rational.

The philosophical writer stands in danger of harming his readers in the very act of trying to help them, by fostering an unhealthy presumption, passivity, and dependence.

Intellectual humility and the keen sense of our ignorance are the necessary starting points for genuine philosophical development; therefore, books—even as they transmit brilliant philosophical insights—undercut philosophy at its root.

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Melzer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.