Hobbes
Political Philosopher (1588-1679)
Thomas Hobbes is best known for his revolutionary political thought which is still applicable in today’s context. Amongst his political conventions he devised political order to deal with human interactions in attaining peace and avoiding conflict, fear and danger and most importantly managing civil conflicts. Hobbes’s main argument for the social contract is his inventory of a ‘state of nature’ where everything resembles civil war and humanity is plagued by universal insecurity with a fear of a violent death and rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.
Quotes:
The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.
A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.
A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “Facts”. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
No man’s error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.
Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.
Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.
A man’s conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.
In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.