Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

The other reason is that what happens to the individual is a cause of well-being in what directs the world--of its well-being, its fulfillment, or its very existence, even. Because the whole is damaged if you cut away anything--anything at all--from its continuity and its coherence. Not only its parts, but its purposes. And that's what you're doing when you complain: hacking and destroying.

It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of "sin" is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary.

The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Let us be understood. If the Japanese surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, having been intimidated, we will rejoice. But we refuse to see anything in such grave news other than the need to argue more energetically in favor of a true international society, in which the great powers will not have superior rights over small and middle-sized nations, where such an ultimate weapon will be controlled by human intelligence rather than by the appetites and doctrines of various states. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

My philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway, and hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes - all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists.

Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.

When scolded for masturbating in public, he said "I wish it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly."

The Mass is the greatest blasphemy of God, and the highest idolatry upon earth, an abomination the like of which has never been in Christendom since the time of the Apostles.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

Children and fools speak the truth; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.

Pleasure, or pain, is not only good, or evil, in itself, but the measure of what is good or evil, in every object of desire or aversion; for the ultimate reason why we pursue one thing, and avoid another, is because we expect pleasure from the former, and apprehend pain from the latter. If we sometimes decline a present pleasure, it is not because we are averse to pleasure itself, but because we conceive, that in the present instance, it will be necessarily connected with a greater pain. In like manner, if we sometimes voluntarily submit to a present pain, it is because we judge that it is necessarily connected with a greater pleasure.

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

The entire heaven, making its parts everywhere harmonize with him, is filled with spirits emanating out of the Sun. For this god is ruler of five orbits in the heavens, and whilst traversing three out of these orbits, he produces in three the Graces, themselves three in number, the remaining circles form the Scales to the Balance of supreme Necessity.

In general, the form and the structure of the brains of quadrupeds are almost the same as those of the brain of man...

I pass, at length, to the third and perfectly absolute dominion, which we call democracy.

When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.

Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak. To act as if death did not exist, or to act thinking every minute of death, is perhaps the same thing.

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.

The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands.

Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

Holding fast to these things, you will know the worlds of gods and mortals which permeates and governs everything. And you will know, as is right, nature similar in all respects, so that you will neither entertain unreasonable hopes nor be neglectful of anything.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.

This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous State of France-where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be producd in the place of it-where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable.

Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

Never will this prevail, that the things that are not are - bar your thought from this road of inquiry.

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.

When your father is alive, observe his will. When your father is dead observe his former actions. If, for three years after the death of your father you do not change from the ways of your father, you can be called a 'real son'.

France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.

I prefer to reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused.

The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies.

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lower passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen.