Quotes from Martin Cohen

the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.

the problem with philosphy problems is that they don't have proper solutions

ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.

Leibniz's machine was designed to automate the dreary task of solving moral problems

There are already plenty of people who will take a firm stand on the need to be competely impartial between right and wrong.

it is not places that are dangerous, but people

the problem with philosophy problems is that they don't have proper solutions

Justice will be found, said Plato, when everyone does their own job, and minds their own business

Out of them all, Socrates is the hardest to deconstruct... Indeed, he may just be indeconstructible.

the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.

As long ago as the early 1980s, a UK government poster depicted a human being as a 2,048,000 kilobyte memory. (That's only two megabytes – about one song on an iPod – but at the time it sounded a lot!)

Understanding how people arrive at their opinions and conclusions gives insights into what people say and think — and can even help you anticipate people's behaviour and responses in advance.

The Communist Manifesto (like anarchism, the rival ideology at the time) requires of its adherents a great deal of blind faith. In this, it's more of a religious doctrine than a scientific theory. For this reason, it's not surprising that the words of the Manifesto actually took root among the pre-industrial societies of Africa, China, South America and Russia – among the 'rural idiots', as Marx and Engels used to refer to people who worked on the land.

Many New Testament verses call for obedience and subservience on the part of slaves (Colossians 3:22–25; Ephesians 6:5–9; I Peter 2:18–25; Titus 2:9–10; I Timothy 6:1–2), and people used the verses to justify human slavery.

I really believe that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding. – Leibniz

Another curious case is that of the word assassin, which you may use to describe a certain kind of politically motivated killer. The word derives from the historical case of a certain religious sect that used to murder people while under the influence of hashis. The word for someone who smokes hashish is hashashin.

jiggery pokery – which is the ancient nomadic term for doing things with words.

However, it's in a less formal book by Bentham, The Commonplace Book, that you find the phrase 'the happiness of the greatest number', which really sums up the philosophy. ('commonplace books' being a kind of posh scrapbook popular at the time with intellectuals to copy out their favourite poems and so on.)