The circulation of commodities is the original precondition of the circulation of money.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

Such parliamentary bagpipes I myself have heard play tunes, much to the satisfaction of the people.

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

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

The one loves to do good, the other to do harm; the one to help even strangers, the other to attack even its dearest friends.

Since the law is good, the will, which is hostile to it, cannot be good.

Youth is wholly experimental.

All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose.

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state.

Every man is a new method.

The concept of freedom, as the Philosophy of Right has shown, follows the pattern of free ownership. As a result, the history of the world that Hegel looks out upon exalts and enshrines the history of the middle-class, which based itself on this pattern. There is a stark truth in Hegel's strangely certain announcement that history has reached its end. But it announces the funeral of a class, not of history.

The priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live. In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. the tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm denounced is against the particular creed of Doctr. Cooper; and as impudently denounced as if they really knew what it is.

An unbiased reader, on opening one of their [Fichte's, Schelling's or Hegel's] books and then asking himself whether this is the tone of a thinker wanting to instruct or that of a charlatan wanting to impress, cannot be five minutes in any doubt. ... The tone of calm investigation, which had characterized all previous philosophy, is exchanged for that of unshakeable certainty, such as is peculiar to charlatanry of every kind and at all times. ... From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effect to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible.

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat - as is the case with the better artists. But it does not seem right that they stop with the historical themes already given and, so to speak, think that only these are suitable for poetic treatment, because these particular themes, which intrinsically are no more poetic than others, are now again animated and inspirited by a great poetic nature. In this case the artists advance by marching on the spot. - Why are modern heroes and the like not just as poetic? Is it because there is so much emphasis on clothing the content in order that the formal aspect can be all the more finished?

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

Natural selection is like artificial selection, but without the human chooser. Instead of a human deciding which offspring shall die in which shall reproduce, nature 'decides'. The quotation marks are vital because nature doesn't consciously decide. This might seem too obvious to emphasize, but you'd be surprised by the number of people who think natural selection implies some kind of personal choice. They couldn't be more wrong. It just is the case that some offspring are more likely to die while others have what it takes to survive and reproduce. Therefore, as the generations go by, the average, typical creature in the population becomes ever better at the arts of surviving and reproducing. Ever better, I should specify, when, when measured against some absolute standard.

To farm is to be placed absolutely.

The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself.

The chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. ... the sight of the Island and the sounds became very rare ... and the yearning for the sight ... became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have them again soon. ... it came into his head that he might perhaps get the old feeling-for what, he thought, had the Island ever given him but a feeling?-by imagining. He shut his eyes and set his teeth again and made a picture of the Island in his mind.

A Muslim who knows French will never be a dangerous Muslim.

The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.

The mystery is that the world is at it is -- a mystery that is the source of all joy and all sorrow, of all hope and fear, and the source of development both creative and degenerative. The contingency of all into which time enters is the source of pathos, comedy, and tragedy.

Before either of us knew it, we belonged to each other.

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

A on his lips and not-A in his heart.

His character does not appear more extraordinary and unusual by the mixture of so much absurdity with so much penetration, than by his tempering such violent ambition, and such enraged fanaticism with so much regard to justice and humanity.

The true goal of the bourgeois life, in other words, is not self-enactment, but diversion. Most people need the organised distraction of work (if they can find it). Idleness - the life of the playboy who doesn't answer the phone - is simply too demanding. "

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

We cannot stand by while the social contract is broken by those who chose conflict over equality. Those that want equal treatment for themselves have to treat others equally. They cannot lead with exclusion, then turn around and demand equal treatment. It is a double standard. If they are going to exclude first, then justice demands that we, the group that stands with universality, follow our duty to react and exclude those that exclude.

More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that constitutes the immense monody of his Obermann, Sénancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter - and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the most profound and intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic. "Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from it negative to the positive form - "And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate" - and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What! — by such narrow ways — ?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Plagued by Western habits of either-or, dualistic thinking, we all may fail to understand that race, class and gender interconnect to sustain a corporate ruling class. In the language of African-American essayist bell hooks, they are interlocking systems of oppression. Neither Latina nor Anglo women should yield to the temptation of making a hierarchy of oppressions where battles are fought over whether racism is "worse" than sexism, or class oppression is "deeper" than racism, etc. Instead of hierarchies we need bridges which, after all, exist to make two ends meet.