A person who is shallow aspires to depth; one who is ugly aspires to beauty; one who is narrow aspires to breadth; one who is poor aspires to wealth; one who is humble aspires to esteem. Whatever one lacks in oneself he must seek outside.

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.

Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.

The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.

What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.

No doubt markets transmit information in the way that Hayek claimed. But what reason is there to believe that - unlike any other social institution - they have a built-in capacity to correct their mistakes? History hardly supports the supposition. Moods of irrational exuberance and panic can, and often do, swamp the price-discovery functions of markets.

If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantaneously destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves.

The application of scientific formulations of the principle of probability statistically determined is thus a logical corollary of the principle already stated, that the subject matter of scientific findings is relational, not individual. It is for this reason that it is safe to predict the ultimate triumph of the statistical doctrine.

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side - there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.

There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

There can never be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corrdiors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. There never was a man so helpless as one who cannot remember.

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

The President ... may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war.

Any fool can make a ruleAnd every fool will mind it.

A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs, The world uncertain comes and goes; The lover rooted stays.

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!

We were ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

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

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Pantheism makes God into a present, real, and material being; empiricism - to which rationalism also belongs - makes God into an absent, remote, unreal, and negative being. Empiricism does not deny God existence, but denies him all positive determinations, because their content is supposed to be only finite and empirical; the infinite cannot, therefore, be an object for man. But the more determinations I deny to a being, the more do I cut it of[ from myself, and the less power and influence do I concede to it over me, the freer do I make myself of it. The more qualities I possess, the more I am for others, and the greater is the extent of my influence and effects. And the more one is, the more one is known to others. Hence, each negation of an attribute of God is a partial atheism, a sphere of godlessness.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.

To be content with life - or to live merrily, rather - all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to that or some truer method of philosophy.

The laws of Rome had wisely divided public power among a large number of magistracies, which supported, checked and tempered each other. Since they all had only limited power, every citizen was qualified for them, and the people - seeing many persons pass before them one after the other - did not grow accustomed to any in particular. But in these times the system of the republic changed. Through the people the most powerful men gave themselves extraordinary commissions - which destroyed the authority of the people and magistrates, and placed all great matters in the hands of one man, or a few.

Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.

An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived.

We give voice to our trivial cares, but suffer enormities in silence.

Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage. Right is the claim of the individual to his share of the benefit arising from his neighbors' discharge of their several duties.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity. Variants: It should be noted that the games of children are not games, and must be considered as their most serious actions. For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition and self-renouncing love ought at least to have lost its seductive plausibility when, after an activity of thousands of years, it has left nothing behind but the - misery of today. Why then still fruitlessly expect self-sacrifice to bring us better times? Why not rather hope for them from usurpation? Salvation comes no longer from the giver, the bestower, the loving one, but from the taker, the appropriator (usurper), the owner. Communism, and, consciously, egoism-reviling humanism, still count on love.