From The Barbarism Of The Savage To The Barbarism Of Decay

Giambattista Vico, The New Science, tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (New York: Cornell University Press, 1948), Conclusion of the Work, §1106, p. 381:

For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits, that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one's guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.

To Philosophise

Immanuel Kant, Introduction to Logic, tr. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London, 1885), p. 16:

Two things, chiefly, are required in a philosopher—1. Cultivation of talents and of skill, so as to use them for various ends. 2. Readiness in the use of all means to any ends that may be chosen. Both must be united; for without knowledge one can never become a philosopher; yet never will knowledge alone constitute a philosopher, unless there is added a fitting combination of all his knowledge and skill into unity, and an insight into the harmony of the same with the highest ends of human reason. 

No one can call himself a philosopher who cannot philosophize. Now, it is only by practice and independent use of one’s reason that one can learn to philosophize. 

How, indeed, can Philosophy be learned? Every philosophical thinker builds his own work on the ruins, so to speak, of another; but nothing has ever been built that could be permanent in all its parts. It is, therefore, impossible to learn philosophy, even for this reason, that it does not yet exist. But even supposing that there were a philosophy actually existing, yet no one who learned it could say of himself that he was a philosopher, for his knowledge of it would still be only subjectively historical. [...]

He who desires to learn to philosophize must, on the contrary, regard all systems of philosophy only as a history of the use of reason, and as objects for the exercise of his philosophical ability.

The true philosopher, therefore, must, as an independent thinker, make a free and independent, not a slavishly imitative, use of his reason. Nor must it be dialectical, that is, a use which aims only at giving to his knowledge an appearance of truth and wisdom. This is the business of the mere Sophist; but thoroughly inconsistent with the dignity of the philosopher, as one who knows and teaches Wisdom.

A Lot Of Numskulls

Paul Hazard, European Thought in the eighteenth Century: from Montesquieu to Lessing, tr. J. Lewis May (Yale University Press, 1954), p. 8 (the author is describing what we find in Jonathan Swift's opus):

. . . And the Philosophers? A lot of numskulls grinding away in vacuo; nothing is too absurd, too outrageous, to be put forward by one or another of them.