Science is international but its success is based on institutions, which are owned by nations. If therefore, we wish to promote culture we have to combine and to organize institutions with our own power and means.

Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind.

The individual who is subordinate to an objective law feels himself determined by it, while he, in turn, in no way determines the law, and has no possibility of reacting to it in a manner which could influence it-quite in contrast to even the most miserable slave, who, in some fashion at last, can still in this sense react to his master.

Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech.

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.

I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts.

Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them? But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.

Great also are the souls of the defenders-men who know that, as long as the path to death lies open, the blockade is not complete, men who breathe their last in the arms of liberty.

Man is the creature of circumstances.

Passion, intellect, moral activity - these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation.

The newsmen were writing down sentences busily as Hoskins spoke to them. They did not understand and they were sure their readers would not, but it sounded scientific and that was what counted.

This is probably the fundamental dimension of 'ideology': ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence -that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing'. 'Ideological is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by "false consciousness"'. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be 'a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject': the subject can 'enjoy his symptom' only in so far as its logic escapes him - the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men. "As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz.

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

We are but numbers, born to consume resources.

I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.

From these two immediate perceptions, we gain a mediate, or inferential perception of the relation of all four instants. This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object being represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively, or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced in the second moment. (The reader will observe that I use the word instant to mean a point in time, and moment to mean an infinitesimal duration.

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.

...the competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

If you are going to be a writer, you must be paranoid. The thing is, in the arts if you don't overreact, you fall asleep.

Nature made women mature early and had them demand gentle and polite treatment from men, so that they would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity; and they would find themselves brought, if not quite to morality itself, then at least to that which cloaks it, moral behavior, which is the preparation and introduction to morality.

But Don Quixote was converted. Yes - and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit - this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die.

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. Variant translation: Every nation criticizes every other one - and they are all correct.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow. Thou mayest say, "I love only God, God the Father." Wrong! If Thou lovest Him, thou dost not love Him alone; but if thou lovest the Father, thou lovest also the Son. Or thou mayest say, "I love the Father and I love the Son, but these alone; God the Father and God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ who ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of the Father, the Word by whom all things were made, the Word who was made flesh and dwelt amongst us; only these do I love." Wrong again! If thou lovest the Head, thou lovest also the members; if thou lovest not the members, neither dost thou love the Head.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

For as when much superfluous matter has gathered in simple bodies, nature makes repeated efforts to remove and purge it away, thereby promoting the health of these bodies, so likewise as regards that composite body the human race, when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.

The "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.

I feel that the entire spiritual life consists in this: That we gradually turn from those things whose appearance is deceptive to those things that are real.

All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.

II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.

One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.

Never has there been one possessed of complete sincerity who did not move others. Never has there been one who had not sincerity who was able to move others.

Societies, not states, are 'the social atoms' with which students of history have to deal.

Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."