“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
The Crisis No. V
Source: 1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)
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Thomas Paine 262
English and American political activist 1737–1809Related quotes
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.260
Introduction : The absurdity of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)
Context: The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart — the difference between theory and experience.
2011, Tucson Memorial Address (January 2011)
Context: Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
“An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”
Though Sheen is quoted as saying this in Look magazine (14 December 1955) the earliest located declaration of this witticism was by John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir on 21 February 1936: "I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support."
Misattributed
Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. IV Section I - Speculation on the Doctrine of the Depravity of Human Reason
Interview (23 September 1966), published posthumously in Der Spiegel (31 May 1976), as translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader (1991), edited by Richard Wolin.
Context: Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us.
“The Contradiction in Objectivism,” 1968