The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.

The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

It is only the ignorant who despise education.

The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.)

Bernie Sanders is...an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he's old-school. He's like me. He doesn't know the buzzwords. He doesn't endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it's true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn't... use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn't be blinded by certain kinds of words they're looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.

Do not block the way of inquiry.

The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

Do not mistake yourself by believing that your being has something in it more exalted than that of others.

You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.

And finally remember that nothing harms him who is really a citizen, which does not harm the state; nor yet does anything harm the state which does not harm law [order]; and of these things which are called misfortunes not one harms law. What then does not harm law does not harm either state or citizen.

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

Each the herald is who wrote His rank, and quartered his own coat. There is no king nor sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right.

It goes without saying that the normal durability of fixed capital is calculated on the supposition that all the conditions under which it can perform its functions normally during that time are fulfilled, just as we assume, in placing a mans life at 30 years on the average,that he will wash himself.

In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

Today war seems to have undergone a change of meaning, insofar as it is not a war of religion but a war of interests, not a war of conflicting cultures or civilizations but a war of national areas, not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non-combatant population.

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

These influences of my young childhood were greatest: 1, the mountain landscape, 2, my father the impossible idealist, and 3, the upringing of a closely-knit Christian home.

To have been a Sovereign, yet the champion of liberty,-a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. Till his accession the British Constitution was in its Chaos. It had contained, from a very remote period, the simple elements of an harmonious government. But they were in a state not of amalgamation, but of conflict,-not of equilibrium but of alternate elevation and depression. The tyranny of Charles the first produced civil war and anarchy. Tyranny had now again produced resistance and revolution. And, but for the wisdom of the new King, it seems probable that the same cycle of misery would have been again described.

We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not policeman and soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.

It is manifest... that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

Mother Mary, like us, was born in sin of sinful parents, but the Holy Spirit covered her, sanctified and purified her so that this child was born of flesh and blood, but not with sinful flesh and blood. The Holy Spirit permitted the Virgin Mary to remain a true, natural human being of flesh and blood, just as we. However, he warded off sin from her flesh and blood so that she became the mother of a pure child, not poisoned by sin as we are. For in that moment when she conceived, she was a holy mother filled with the Holy Spirit and her fruit is a holy pure fruit, at once God and truly man, in one person.

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

In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Doth perfect beauty stand in need of praise at all? Nay; no more than law, no more than truth, no more than loving kindness, nor than modesty.

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection - it is worth living for. It exists. It has been - it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school in France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their speculations. They had not yet dressed out their philosophy as a religion, nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. They were just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property. I was by no means prepared to go with them even this length; but I was greatly struck with the connected view which they for the first time presented to me, of the natural order of human progress; and especially with their division of all history into organic periods and critical periods.

One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.

It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may pass for no blind apprehension of the Creation of the Sun and Moon, in the work of the fourth day.

To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.