Whatever can be done another day can be done today.

During the last three centuries, there has been, by virtue of the Inquisition, a greater enjoyment of peace, and happiness, in Spain, than in the other nations of Europe.

I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead ofnearer to it - at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique. In politics, also, a reformer may have just as strong a love of power as a despot. It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your capacities.

Know all ye mortals who have entered this contest, that according to our laws and decrees the victor is allowed to exult but the vanquished must not complain. Depart then wherever you please, and in future live every one of you under the guidance of the gods. Let every man choose his own guardian and guide.

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.

The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers.

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view - to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.

Logos is powerless without the force of eros.

It is in this way that all my books have been composed. They were always written at least twice over; a first draft of the entire work was completed to the very end of the subject, then the whole begun again de novo; but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences and parts of sentences of the old draft, which appeared as suitable to my purpose as anything which I could write in lieu of them. I have found great advantages in this system of double redaction. It combines, better than any other mode of composition, the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with the superior precision and completeness resulting from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, I have found that the patience necessary for a careful elaboration of the details of composition and expression, costs much less effort after the entire subject has been once gone through, and the substance of all that I find to say has in some manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper.

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men. "As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz.

Jesus, in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government. That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse.

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, & what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, & consequently may govern them as they please. But persons & property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course, with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, & no longer. Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right. It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only.

Mutation may be random, but selection definitely is not.

Jesus said that God was not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life.

A word spoken in season, at the right moment, is the mother of ages.

When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.

That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

Freedom of thought and of expression are not mere rights to be claimed. They have their roots deep in the existence of individuals as developing careers in time. Their denial and abrogation is an abdication of individuality and a virtual rejection of time as opportunity.

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

It is no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition, as regulated by public laws.

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so ; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.

Yes, to seek power that's vain and never grantedand for it to suffer hardship and endless pain:this is to heave and strain to push uphilla boulder, that still from the very top rolls backand bounds and bounces down to the bare, broad field.

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

So today... red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. ...Polls ...suggest that a substantial... majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats... stole the election, and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president... When you don't have a common factual basis, you... reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people have started to move into.

Avarice, the spur of industry, is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small, that it scarcely admits of calculation. Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable.

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments-that is diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

There are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? What man believes, God believes.

...it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives...

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

A few rules include all that is necessary for the perfection of the definitions, the axioms, and the demonstrations, and consequently of the entire method of the geometrical proofs of the art of persuading.

To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat's are really deadly.

Men became scientific because they expected law in Nature; and they expected law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.

If the gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it.

Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.

[Asked "Do you still favour English independence?"] No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing. Scottish independence, I don't think the Welsh want independence, the Northern Irish certainly don't. The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a,[sic] to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom. I can see there are Scottish nationalists who envision something more than that, but if that becomes a real political force then yeah, we should try for independence too. As it is, as you know, the Scots have two votes: they can vote for their own parliament and vote to put their people into our parliament, who come to our parliament with no interest in Scotland but an interest in bullying us.

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.