Administration is not unlike play-acting. The task of the good actor is to know and play his role, although different roles may differ greatly in content. The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts.

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.

I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.

Man is an enigma whose knot has not ceased to occupy observers. The contradictions that he contains astonish reason and impose silence on it. So what is this inconceivable being who carries within him powers that clash and who is obliged to hate himself in order to esteem himself?

I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, 'Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!' And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.

The most taboo issue on U.S. campuses these days, in many instances, has to do with the vicious Israeli occupation of precious Palestinians. It's very difficult to have a respectful, robust conversation about that. And I am unequivocal in my solidarity with Palestinian brothers and sisters... I'm not in any way going to stop talking about the Palestinian plight and predicament.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

The philosopher ... subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment - namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society.

Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating.

It is not a question of the mass-man being a fool. On the contrary, to-day he is more clever, has more capacity of understanding than his fellow of any previous period. But that capacity is of no use to him; in reality, the vague feeling that he possesses it seems only to shut him up more within himself and keep him from using it. Once for all, he accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere.... Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his "opinions."

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. There are only two ways of approaching this problem on the assumption that it is a genuine problem, and it is easy to see that neither of them can lead to its solution.

They indicate the saddest spiritual paralysis, and mere death-life of the souls of men: more godless theory, I think, was never promulgated in this Earth. A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house!

The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connection in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freefom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort make B follow A.

I wiped away the weeds and foam, And fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ... "an ambition of transcendence."

The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.

When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill.

By MANNERS, I mean not here Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in Peace and Unity. To which end we are to consider that the Felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

All... good and useful properties of character have a price in exchange for others which have just as much use. Talent has a market price, since the sovereign or estate-owner can use a talented person in all sorts of ways. Temperament has a fancy price,22 since one can converse well with such a person; he is a pleasant companion. But, character has an inner value[,] and it is above all price.

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

He laid it down as a maxim, that monarchy was the basis of all good government and the nearer to monarchy any government approached, the more perfect it was, and vice versa; and he certainly in his wildest moments, never had so far forgotten the nature of government, as to argue that we ought to wish for a constitution that we could alter at pleasure, and change like a dirty shirt. He was by no means anxious for a monarchy with a dash of republicanism to correct it. But the French constitution was the exact opposite of the English in every thing, and nothing could be so dangerous as to set it up to the view of the English, to mislead and debauch their minds.

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

Throughout history there have been peasant rebellions which have followed always the same course. Blindly, the peasants sacked and destroyed, and when members of the "upper classes" fell into their hands, they killed ruthlessly and cruelly, for never in their lives had they been taught gentleness and mercy by those now in their power.

For a desperate disease a desperate cure.

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Mechanical, chemical, and vital Forces form an ascending progression, each including the preceding. Chemical Affinity includes in its nature Mechanical Force, and may often be practically resolved into Mechanical Force. (Thus the ingredients of gunpowder, liberated from their chemical union, exert great mechanical Force : a galvanic battery acting by chemical process does the like.) Vital Forces include in their nature both chemical Affinities and mechanical Forces: for Vital Powers produce both chemical changes, (digestion,) and motions which imply considerable mechanical force, (as the motion of the sap and of the blood.)

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.

When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose.

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

The moral things I wish to say to future generations is very simple. I should say love is wise hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn the kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

The visible world has, as I have said, subsisted around him from all eternity: and the Light also which surrounds the world has also its place from all eternity, not intermittently, nor in different degrees at different times, but constantly and in an equable manner. But whosoever will attempt to estimate, as far as thought goes, this external Nature, by the measure of Time, he will very easily discover respecting the Sun, Sovereign of all things, of how many blessings he is, from all eternity, the author to the world.

Nature is the best posture-master.

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?

It is not enough for a wise man to study nature and truth; he should dare state truth for the benefit of the few who are willing and able to think.

No proceeding is better than that which you have concealed from the enemy until the time you have executed it. To know how to recognize an opportunity in war, and take it, benefits you more than anything else. Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many. Discipline in war counts more than fury.