An Archive of Quotes
Here are some things I've heard philosophers say over the years. I've archived them here for posterity.
Everybody gets a paper rejected. Everybody gets mice in their house. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t be alone.
I don’t want to change the world, I just want to establish a bunch of biconditionals.
You know, in our society, kids rarely get fed by monkeys.
The phenomenon you’re trying to explain is just deer eating grass.
Consider this pen lid and this non-pen lid (said by a philosopher referring to a pen and its cap).
If there were a race of sheep that never felt pleasure or pain, they would be totally outside the moral universe.
Some company put on their label 'won’t turn pink' and I was like, what’s the contrast class?
Every male philosopher says “I birthed myself on the mountain!” and it’s like well, you didn’t birth yourself.
I am the sixth cousin, eight times removed, of— I swear to fucking god— David Hume.
People have shot raccoons thinking it was their spouse.
So the odds are that, right now, you’re a Boltzmann brain. This does of course have the unfortunate consequence that at any moment you might disintegrate back into the vacuum state . . . but, so far, so good.
Just average all of our faces and we’ll be more attractive.
You shouldn’t murder . . . it seems to follow that you shouldn’t murder someone outside of your light cone.
If that’s really what’s going on then you’ve just gotta roll up your sleeves and come to grips with blob size.
You could self-attribute a standing and very powerful desire to eat peanut butter cups.
I’m not sure whether my cringe tolerance would increase under comic idealization.
Metaethics is a horrible subject and you never get anything that you want.
Your counterexample is impossible, because if it were possible it would be a counterexample.
That’s what happens when you win philosophy: you become president of Exxon Mobil. Welcome to the resistance, Rex Tillerson.
The Norwegians have all the money to publish in bioethics.
The kid is only that way because the kid participates in the form of the good.
How do you feel about trilaterality and triangularity?
Fidget spinners are really fun because the angular momentum is so strong.
It’s the study of being qua being . . . I’ve never had any idea what that’s supposed to mean.
1: If something is scarlet, it isn’t orange!
2: Well, scarlet is a little blue, but mostly red.
1: But it’s not yellow!
A lot of poems aren’t that good and you just have to be ready for that.
I feel like I was really deep in questionable metaphor that whole time.
The reason that laps are such fragile creatures is that they have no being of their own.
Inherence as constitution has been the source of much . . . darkness . . .
Ants are very interesting. They’re like Roman legions.
CAPITALISM. WILL. COME. FOR. YOUR. FARMERS MARKET.
Bert happens to have an antidote to the cleaning fluid.
1: I’m laughing because it’s overdetermined
2: Yeah, I hate people who say that.
Are there luges? Or are there just simples arranged luge-wise?
To be is to be the value of a bound variable. You know, that sort of hangover.
So imagine you need a barn that’s not a facade because there’s going to be a thunderstorm.
Everyone aims at being socially graceful and riddled with white lies.
If you’re hungry, that’s all we need to know. Like, here’s a sandwich. Let’s get on with our lives.
You have to say things about your theory unless you’re, you know, ready to quit cognitively.
I’m giving you the engine that creates anxiety. That’s my gift to the world.
You should really keep your parentheses open until you die, and then your sentence is done. And even then you haven’t really said what you thought you were saying.
What’s vermillion? . . . that’s my substantive contribution for the day.
Your hand is the hamster I hate.
Delete any of the events . . . Billy’s rock . . . it’s still comin . . .
I’m sure you could find a plurality of people who don’t understand intelligible things.
That was a very crude, unsophisticated butchering of Ted’s beautiful framework.
What are the things I say?
1: I thought he called them "the sympathetic" and "the procedural"
2: Yeah but these names are better.
A person is in pain if they contain a pain.
Imagine that I am the grandchild of four swamp-things!
The whoosh isn’t you moving through time, it’s time moving through you.
Let’s all go make ourselves a part of a system that’s super high phi and see if our consciousness disappears.
This is what mathematicians call a graph structure . . . it’s . . . arrows . . .
I agree with everything you said. I just disagree with the point of it.
Sure. Win the words.
Well, tough crap— physics just changed and now voodoo is true.
I’ve heard people say that, and now, you’re among them.
1: What’s worse: Broken legs or broken arms?
2: Blind!
1: . . . that wasn’t an option.
I’m sorry pigeons but like this thing is red, and not whatever weird tetrachromatic color you attribute to it.
It’s such a subtle lamp, people don’t really understand what’s going on. I actually gave a demonstration of it in a faculty meeting . . . most humiliating thing I’ve ever done in a faculty meeting.
There are some non-racist metaphors.
Voodoo dolls can kill people if you, you know, choke someone with one.
When you say “lose their shit”, what does that mean?
Philosophy of feminism is not only published and taught, but it’s also hosted, organized, and funded by a catholic institution.
I mean, there’s gotta be some reason why this isn’t readable.
Suppose that if we organize around ending climate change, the sun will go supernova.
For every dark corner of logical space there’s someone willing to squat in it.
You can’t squeeze an apple, but you can squeeze a human.
1: It’s ok, this chapter was really hard to understand.
2: No it wasn’t.
1: Ok. . .
Turns out it’s holobionts all the way down.
We should probably keep the toaster somewhere secret because the fire marshal condemned it.
There’s no use for theory unless someone gets hurt first.
I hate myself, and everyone else, and this?