Top 35 Simon Blackburn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.”

— Simon Blackburn

2. “When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly.”

— Simon Blackburn

3. “The absolutist takes himself to speak to the ages, with the tongue of angels, but the relativist hears only one version among others, the subjectivity of the here and now.”

— Simon Blackburn

4. “The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge.”

— Simon Blackburn

5. “The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles.”

— Simon Blackburn

6. “Chance is as relentless as necessity.”

— Simon Blackburn

7. “In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.”

— Simon Blackburn

8. “Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.”

— Simon Blackburn

9. “The fantasist in whom the reality barrier has broken down is unreliable, believing things when he should not, and telling things as true when they are not.”

— Simon Blackburn

10. “An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march.”

— Simon Blackburn

11. “Respect, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden.”

— Simon Blackburn

12. “Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.”

— Simon Blackburn

13. “The absolutist parades his good solid grounding in observation, reason, objectivity, truth and fact; the relativist sees only fetishes.”

— Simon Blackburn

14. “It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.”

— Simon Blackburn

15. “If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling.”

— Simon Blackburn

16. “Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?”

— Simon Blackburn

17. “We can grieve over lost powers and memories, or rejoice over gained knowledge and maturity, according to taste.”

— Simon Blackburn

18. “Thoughts are strange things. they have ‘representational’ powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.”

— Simon Blackburn

19. “A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.”

— Simon Blackburn

20. “Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.”

— Simon Blackburn

21. “Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything.”

— Simon Blackburn

22. “The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear.”

— Simon Blackburn

23. “Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.”

— Simon Blackburn

24. “Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous .”

— Simon Blackburn

25. “Paradigms can be asked to show their worth, an some of them do not stand up.”

— Simon Blackburn

26. “Reflection matters because it is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.”

— Simon Blackburn

27. “So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections.”

— Simon Blackburn

28. “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.”

— Simon Blackburn

29. “A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible. The.”

— Simon Blackburn

30. “There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything.”

— Simon Blackburn

31. “Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them.”

— Simon Blackburn

32. “We can check on what people say by seeing what they do.”

— Simon Blackburn

33. “To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alternatives, and so on.”

— Simon Blackburn

34. “Science similarly contains within itself the devices for correcting the illusions of science. That is its crowning glory. When we come upon intellectual endeavours that contain no such devices – one might cite psychoanalysis, grand political theories, ‘new age’ science, creationist science – we need not be interested.”

— Simon Blackburn

35. “The time we take out, whether it is to do mathematics or music, or to read Plato or Jane Austen, is time to be cherished.”

— Simon Blackburn

36. “How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.”

— Simon Blackburn

37. “I cannot climb out onto the nature of your mind. So how then do I know anything about your mental life? How do I know, for instance, that you see the colour blue the way that I do? Might it be that some of us feel pain more, but make less fuss about it, or that others feel pain less, but make more fuss?”

— Simon Blackburn

38. “Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind.”

— Simon Blackburn

39. “Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one.”

— Simon Blackburn