As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.

What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom. Variant: There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. Not found in James's writings. The earliest similar cite is to Episcopal Methodist Bishop W. F. Oldham in 1906. Quote Investigator. A related quote is in James's Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) (see above): "Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it."

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

The Master said, "He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.

Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? 8:26 (KJV)

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."

The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle.

Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul.

the human being, corrupted to the root, can neither desire nor perform anything but evil.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Therefore death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.

Good and strong will. Mechanism must precede science (learning). Also in morals and religion? Too much discipline makes one narrow and kills proficiency. Politeness belongs, not to discipline, but to polish, and thus comes last.

Actions may be laudable or blameable; but they cannot be reasonable: Laudable or blameable, therefore, are not the same with reasonable or unreasonable. The merit and demerit of actions frequently contradict, and sometimes controul our natural propensities. But reason has no such influence. Moral distinctions, therefore, are not the offspring of reason. Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.

It is by the Imperial Capital that contemporaries (and posterity, too) judge an Empire, and its magnificence impresses them mightily and leads them to judge the Emperor a great man and hero, even though it may all be based on robbery, and though the provinces of the Empire may be sunk in misery.

The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

The rest of the story, to Grand's thinking, was very simple. The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love.

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

What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

When you see a person squirming in the clutches of the Law, say to him: "Brother, get things straight. You let the Law talk to your conscience. Make it talk to your flesh.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

As usurpation is the exercise of power which another has a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to...

A Roman emperor sitting at the table surrounded by his bodyguard is a magnificent sight, but when the reason is fear, the magnificence pales. So also when the individual does not dare stand taciturnly by his word, does not stand freely and confidently on the pedestal of a conscious act, but is surrounded by a host of deliberations before and after that render him incapable of getting his eye on the action.

But the inner part is the better part; for to it, as both ruler and judge, all these messengers of the senses report the answers of heaven and earth and all the things therein, who said, "We are not God, but he made us." My inner man knew these things through the ministry of the outer man, and I, the inner man, knew all this, I, the soul, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of earth about my God, and it answered, "I am not he, but he made me."

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing - the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

The destiny of the spiritual World, and, - since this is the substantial World, while the physical remains subordinate to it, or, in the language of speculation, has no truth as against the spiritual, - the final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.

There is the love of knowing without the love of learning; the beclouding here leads to dissipation of mind.

The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations.

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

The deceiver is really the fool.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.

Plato was synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a decidedly Oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color.

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion.

I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I'm telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit.

By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.