Hobbes Leviathan Quotes & Sayings

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. - HOBBES, Leviathan — Neal Stephenson

Thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves — Michel Foucault

Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating — Mark Haddon

Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterwork Leviathan. I strongly recommend that you read part III, chapter 38, and part IV, chapter 44, — Anonymous

This is a book about texts as well as their authors, it is not a textbook so much as a context book and a pretext book, concerned with settings and motives as well as the works themselves. Its success will be measured by the readers who pick up Plato's Republic, Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and find themselves engrossed rather than baffled - and even when they are baffled, are happy to go on reading, interrogating, and arguing with their authors for themselves. — Alan Ryan

Where there is no common power, there is no law — Thomas Hobbes

["Love is the love of one {singularly,} with desire to be singularly beloved." - Hobbes{Leviathan, (1651), Part I, Chapter VI}.] — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man - motivated by self-interest - is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a strong controlling state, 'an artificial man', to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics. — Ronald Carter

For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; — Thomas Hobbes

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day. — Howard Nemerov

Primitive man's life in Hobbes' famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes' ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king's will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves. — Lewis Mumford

Nature indeed plants the seeds of religion--fear and ignorance; kingcraft and priestcraft water and tend it. — W.G. Pogson Smith

The frown on his face dissolved, and he shook his head. "No, it's not you, it's me. I can't stop thinking about your breasts and it's pissing me off." His eyes did a rapid blinking thing. "Hell. Tell me I didn't just say that. — Sandra Owens

I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it. — Robert Anton Wilson

I have the right to shine my light! That's what all women have. Once you own that, you can almost always shine your light. — Kimberly Elise

In a letter, once, he drew me a picture, or allegorical diagram, imitated from the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, which showed a Leviathan of human values. In the head there stood a figure labeled SAINT. In the heart, a figure labeled HERO. Twittering round the huge figure there was an insect-like object dressed as a man of fashion of the seventeenth century and labeled GENTLEMAN; from its mouth there issued a balloon in which was written in tiny letters: 'and where do I come in?'. Mirabel, he went on to say, was no part of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase of Blake's that he had his own meaning for. Perhaps the hunger for magnitude that made him admire Gilgamesh and the Edda, and made Spenser and Milton his favourites, disabled him from an appreciation, which I could not deny, for a world of elegant cuckoldry and cynic wit, so seemingly heartless, a trifler's scum of humanity that sought to be taken for its cream. — Jocelyn Gibb

No matter whether you claim a slave by purchase or capture, the title is bad. They who claim to own their fellow-men, look down into the pit and forget the justice that should rule the world. — Zeno Of Citium

My grandfather used to wear a black hat and coat. You are my children. You are my jewels. We old ones invest our future in you. — Diane Samuels

Disco music in the '70s was just a call to go wild and party and dance with no thought or conscience or regard for tomorrow. — Martha Reeves

Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Hobbes's distrust for the individual with his confidence in the altruistic nature of the individual or individuals who will oversee and control the Leviathan. Are not the latter also of flesh and blood? Hobbes seems to be saying that man's nature cannot be trusted but the nature of a ruler or a ruling assembly of men can be trusted. How so? — Mark R. Levin

To be meshed with Christ is to be immersed in his love — Sunday Adelaja

In his eyes Hobbes, who had savaged the Church in Leviathan (1651), was unambiguously wicked, and excluding him was a pleasure. He told his friend Thomas Tyers that he had 'scorned' to quote Hobbes 'because I did not like his principles'.6 Among the texts he did cite, however, was John Bramhall's 1658 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a book now known, if at all, for having been praised by T. S. Eliot. For — Henry Hitchings

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart. — Marcel Proust

there were few things in the world more useless than an empty gun. — Evan Currie

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion. — Thomas Hobbes

Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented. — Steven Pinker

It's always been my philosophy to keep a lot of balls in the air. With music, most things don't pan out, so you try to increase your odds by being involved with a million things at once. — Adam Schlesinger

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper. — Thorstein Veblen

I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit. — David Byrne

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side. — Alan Ryan