Sidney Hook Quotes

Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Everyone who remembers their own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques.

The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence is morally dead, because he’s prepared to sacrifice all other values which give life its meaning. —SIDNEY HOOK

Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.

The grammar of language locks us into certain forms of logic and ways of thinking. As the writer Sidney Hook put it, “When Aristotle drew up his table of categories which to him represented the grammar of existence, he was really projecting the grammar of the Greek language on the cosmos.” Linguists have enumerated the high number of concepts that have no particular word to describe them in the English language. If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them.

The politician, whose authority rests upon the mandate of the popular will, is resentful of the scholar who can, with dexterity, slip from position to position without dragging the anchor of public opinion…. The intellectual, on the other hand, finds it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good. And even when they realize this difference, most intellectuals consider their chief functions that of the critic—and politicians are sensitive to critics—( possibly because we have so many of them). “Many intellectuals,” Sidney Hook has said, “would rather die than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right.

In 1941 when Sidney Hook complained about a piece in Glamour entitled ‘What To Do if You Fall in Love with a Married Man, by Bertrand Russell’, Russell admitted he had got $50 for it: his wife had written the article, he had merely signed his name.