Morris Raphael Cohen Quotes

It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.

Wisdom is not to be obtained from textbooks, but must be coined out of human experience in the flame of life.

Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature.

Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics.

By no amount of reasoning can we altogether eliminate all contingency from our world. Moreover, pure speculation alone will not enable us to get a determinate picture of the existing world. We must eliminate some of the conflicting possibilities, and this can be brought about only by experiment and observation.

Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

Small groups or communities may be far more oppressive to the individual than larger ones. Men are in many ways freer in large cities than in small villages.

If a philosophic theory is once ruled out of court, no one can tell when it will appear again.

If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.

To be sure, the vast majority of people who are untrained can accept the results of science only on authority.

Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives and to almost all revolutionaries.

Law is a formless mass of isolated decisions.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims.

Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.