Men have fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity. For Chance rarely conflicts with intelligence, and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent sharpsightedness.

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave.

I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.

We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself withersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

The more devils we have within us, the more chance we have to form angels.

If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution - the "justice" of exchanging one damage for another.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

It makes no sense to regard the right of suffrage as a utopian product of fantasy, cut loose from social reality. And it is for this reason that it is not a serious instrument of the proletarian dictatorship. It is an anachronism, an anticipation of the juridical situation which is proper on the basis of an already completed socialist economy, but is not in the transition period of the proletarian dictatorship.

The native and untaught suggestions of inquisitive children do often offer things, that may set a considering man's thoughts on work. And I think there is frequently more to be learn'd from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed, and the prejudices of their education.

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisments, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

The labour-power is a commodity, not capital, in the hands of the labourer, and it constitutes for him a revenue so long as he can continuously repeat its sale; it functions as capital after its sale, in the hands of the capitalist, during the process of production itself.

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

Saturninus said, "Comrades, you have lost a good captain to make him an ill general."

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane - yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled!

Despise all those things which when liberated from the body you will not want; invoke the Gods to become your helpers.

Scientific Method... is even less existent than some other non-existent subjects.

There are two great fundamental problems common to all thought: (i) the problem of world- and life-affirmation and world- and life-negation, and (2) the problem of ethics and the relations between ethics and these two forms of man's spiritual attitude to Being.

Printing will tell you such useful things and such interesting things that not being able to read would be as bad as not being able to see.

Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood.

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate-change, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

Conformity is an imitation of grace.

The good old Dominion, the blessed mother of us all.

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

Whatever can be done another day can be done today.

Historical time knows no lasting present.

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

Never accept compliments or criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from.

But we, O blockhead, with dogged spite and armored loveshall force those deaf dark powers to grow ears and hear us!I know that God is earless, eyeless, and heartless too,a brainless Dragon Worm that crawls on earth and hopesin anguish and then in secret that we'll give him soul,for then he, too, may sprout ears, eyes, to match his growth,but God is clay in my ten fingers, and I mould him!

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. Yet the concrete practice of the US legal system from 1883 to 1964 promoted a tyranny of the white majority much more than a safeguarding of the rights of black Americans.

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

Things essentially incorporeal, because they are more excellent than all body and place, are every where, not with interval, but impartibly. Things essentially incorporeal are not locally present with bodies but are present with them when they please; by verging towards them so far as they are naturally adapted so to verge. They are not, however, present with them locally, but through habitude, proximity, and alliance. Things essentially incorporeal, are not present with bodies, by hypostasis and essence; for they are not mingled with bodies. But they impart a certain power which is proximate to bodies, through verging towards them. For tendency constitutes a certain secondary power proximate to bodies.

Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character.

The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one "sees."