Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons.

There is one ethical principle, either you are preserving life generally, or you aren't. Preserving life in your ends and your means determines whether you are good or evil.

If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

The whole title by which you possess your property, is not a title of nature but of a human institution.

The great and inspiring aims of the Revolution became so clouded with and obscured by the methods used by the ruling political power that it was hard to distinguish what was temporary means and what final purpose. Psychologically and socially the means necessarily influence and alter the aims. The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization. In that lies the real tragedy of the Bolshevik philosophy as applied to the Russian Revolution. May this lesson not be in vain.

By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of "order." The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force.

Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy - at least until we have become as clever as they are.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

The election... on November 3 ... illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. ..That election was the most important political fight ...in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States but... for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order.

Let no man be ashamed to speak what he is not ashamed to think.

When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. The same is the case wherever Christianity is introduced into a country the religion of which is not Christianity.

Forty years ago Germany proclaimed the slogan: "Germany above everything. Germany for the Germans, first, last and always. We want peace; therefore we must prepare for war. Only a well armed and thoroughly prepared nation can maintain peace, can command respect, can be sure of its national integrity." And Germany continued to prepare, thereby forcing the other nations to do the same. The terrible European war is only the culminating fruition of the hydra-headed gospel, military preparedness.

Complete ignorance with regard to certain matters is perhaps the best thing for children; but let them learn very early what it is impossible to conceal from them permanently. Either their curiosity must never be aroused, or it must be satisfied before the age when it becomes a source of danger. Your conduct towards your pupil in this respect depends greatly on his individual circumstances, the society in which he moves, the position in which he may find himself, etc. Nothing must be left to chance; and if you are not sure of keeping him in ignorance of the difference between the sexes till he is sixteen, take care you teach him before he is ten.

When one asked him what boys should learn, "That," said he, "which they shall use when men."

By the ruler's cultivation of his own character, the duties of universal obligation are set forth. By honoring men of virtue and talents, he is preserved from errors of judgment.

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception.

Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul.

So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty.

Even though the model referred to satisfies the theory, etc., it is 'unintended'; and we recognize that it is unintended from the description through which it is given (as in the intuitionist case). Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them; they are constructions within our theory itself. and they have names from birth.

The activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow.

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists in the entire world who have a general idea of the history and development of their own particular science; there is not one who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, any scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work. . . .

There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.

I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.

None shall rule but the humble, And none but Toil shall have.

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

To sum up all these steps, each of which is very lengthy and complex, we will have put the game of truth back in the network of constraints and dominations. Truth, I should say rather, the system of truth and falsity, will have revealed the face it turned away from us for so long and which is that of its violence.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

The world and life are one.

The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?

Death is the most blessed dream.

"These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade."

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

One might think that it must be quite clear to people not deprived of reason, that violence breeds violence; that the only means of deliverance from violence lies in not taking part in it. This method, one would think, is quite obvious. It is evident that a great majority of men can be enslaved by a small minority only if the enslaved themselves take part in their own enslavement. If people are enslaved, it is only because they either fight violence with violence or participate in violence for their own personal profit. Those who neither struggle against violence nor take part in it can no more be enslaved than water can be cut. They can be robbed, prevented from moving about, wounded or killed, but they cannot be enslaved: that is, made to act against their own reasonable will.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page-boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk- they are all part of the curriculum.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom. 

It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.

The very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange.