The task of a theory of class is to identify the existing conditions for potential collective struggle and express them as a political proposition.

It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game.

The study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, and its results far more "systematic," if, for instance, pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to assume that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry ... .

I've got a one-dimensional mind.

The purpose of the magnanimous is to be found in procuring benefits for the world and eliminating its calamities. ... Mutual attacks among states, mutual usurpation among houses, mutual injuries among individuals; the lack of grace and loyalty between ruler and ruled, the lack of affection and filial piety between father and son, the lack of harmony between elder and younger brothers - these are the major calamities in the world.

Beneficence is a duty. He who often practices this, and sees his beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love him whom he has benefited. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," this does not mean, "Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of love (in the next place) do him good"; but: "Do good to thy neighbour, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men (as a settled habit of inclination to beneficence)."

The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can - if I may put it this way - find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.

Of all things the worst to teach the young is dalliance, for it is this that is the parent of those pleasures from which wickedness springs.

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

Nowhere is there more constancy and more unanimity than among the French to subordinate that sex which they pretend to honor so highly.

Now, moral philosophers generally prefer to talk about virtues, or about (specific) duties, rights, and so on, rather than about moral images of the world. There are obvious reasons for this; nevertheless, I think that it is a mistake, and that Kant is profoundly right. What we require in moral philosophy is, first and foremost, a moral image of the world, or rather--since, here again, I am more of a pluralist than Kant--a number of complementary moral images of the world.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford.

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

Ambition is the death of thought.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

So clearly will truths kindle light for truths.

Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.

An 'Artificial System' is one in which the 'smaller' groups (the Genera) are 'natural'; and in which the 'wider' divisions (Classes, Orders) are constructed by the 'peremptory' application of selected Characters

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

England and France, the two most civilized nations on earth, who are in contrast to each other because of their different characters, are, perhaps chiefly for that reason, in constant feud with one another. Also, England and France, because of their inborn characters, of which the acquired and artificial character is only the result, are probably the only nations who can be assumed to have a particular and, as long as both national characters are not blended by the force of war, unalterable characteristics. That French has become the universal language of conversation, especially in the feminine world, and that English is the most widely used language of commerce among tradesmen, probably reflects the difference in their continental and insular geographic situation.

We live to improve, or we live in vain.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

It is our fatalest misery just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, till he has first proved himself a Chief of Talkers: which mode of trial for a Worker, is it not precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest and unfairest?

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

Virtuous men alone possess friends.

A real man is he whose goodness is a part of himself.

Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete. "But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments." Then he should have no time to believe.

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

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.

Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.

He was extremely important to his contemporaries, who wanted nothing more than to see in him the Expected One; they wanted almost to press it upon him and and to force him into the role - but that he then refuses to be that!

In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; "I am rising to a man's work."

As free constitutions are the strongest supports of governments, social order is the best safeguard of freedom. Liberty has no enemies so pernicious as those misguided friends whose ardour in her cause leads them to outrage the moral sense of mankind, and to arm against her the interests and feelings which are her natural allies. Even the prejudices of nations should be respected.

The distinction of Fact and Theory is only relative. Brute animals have a practical knowledge of relations of space and force; but they have no knowledge of Geometry or Mechanicks.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.

That, on the whole, if you have got the intrinsic qualities, you have got everything, and the preliminaries will prove attainable; but that if you have got only the preliminaries, you have yet got nothing. A man of real dignity will not find it impossible to bear himself in a dignified manner; a man of real understanding and insight will get to know, as the fruit of his very first study, what the laws of his situation are, and will conform to these.

Abbot Terrasson tells us that if the size of a book were measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required to understand it, then we could say about many books that they would be much shorter were they not so short.