The highest and ultimate personality values are declared to be independent of contrasts like rich and poor, healthy and sick, etc. The world had become accustomed to considering the social hierarchy, based on status, wealth, vital strength, and power, as an exact image of the ultimate values of morality and personality. The only way to disclose the discovery of anew and higher sphere of being and life, of the "kingdom of God" whose order is independent of that worldly and vital hierarchy, was to stress the vanity of the old values in this higher order.

The job of science will never be done, it will just sink deeper and deeper into never-ending complexity.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock - if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection, - so that Roosevelt's weaklings and mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the face of nature.

The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

We can hope that the ways of peace will attract the Arabic nations, for their territory and opportunities are broad enough for immeasurable advance, if the energies vented in spleen, are turned instead to a modernisation of the technology, a restoration of the soil, and a renovation of the economic, social, and political structure of those great and venerable lands.

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.

Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.

With deep roots Ether plunged into earth.

What an incalculable debt do we owe to that little speck of land, Greece.-The principles of taste, the finest models of composition, the doctrines and the glorious examples to which we owe political freedom, the arts, the sciences, architecture, sculpture, every thing that is great and splendid in literature and politics, must be considered as ultimately derived from that little peninsula.

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide ... both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

In 'voluntary' motions, Sensations produce Actions, and the connexion is made by means of Ideas: in 'reflected' motions, the connexion neither seems to be nor is made by means of Ideas: in 'instinctive' motions, the connexion is such as requires Ideas, but we cannot believe the Ideas to exist.

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

An individual may perceive a way of life, or a method of social organisation, by which more of the desires of mankind could be satisfied than under the existing method. If he perceives truly, and can persuade men to adopt his reform, he is justified. Without rebellion, mankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremediable.

All movements go too far.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily - like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

But there has also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were... the leaders of the neoliberal revolution... in the 1980s...

I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.

A few years ago I had occasion to visit Peru, and I got to know a fine philosopher and a truly wonderful human being-Francisco Miro Casada. Miro Casada has been an idealist all his life, while being, at the same time, a man of great experience (a former member of several governments and a former Ambassador to France). I found him a man who represents the social democratic vision in its purest form. Talking to him, and to my other friends in Peru (who represented quite a spectrum of political opinion), I heard something that was summed up in a remark he, Miro Casada, made to me, "Whenever you have a Republican president, we get a wave of military dictatorships in Latin America".

It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a show,-a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,-the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,-the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be.

In Lenin I honor a man, who in total sacrifice of his own person has committed his entire energy to realizing social justice. I do not find his methods advisable. One thing is certain, however: men like him are the guardians and renewers [Erneuerer] of mankind's conscience.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a "crisis." We have lived through Sputnik (when we were "falling behind the Russians"), through the era of "Johnny can't read," and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.

A modest man is steady, an humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous.

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.