It is impossible to read the works of the economists who since the time of Smith have endeavored to build up and elucidate the science of political economy without seeing how, over and over again, they stumble over the law of wages without once recognizing it. Yet, "if it were a dog it would bite them!" Indeed, it is difficult to resist the impression that some of them really saw this law of wages, but, fearful of the practical conclusions to which it would lead, preferred to ignore and cover it up, rather than use it as the key to problems which without it are so perplexing. A great truth to an age which has rejected and trampled on it, is not a word of peace, but a sword!

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.

The superior man, extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, may thus likewise not overstep what is right.

I propose in this inquiry to take nothing for granted, but to bring even accepted theories to the test of first principles, and should they not stand the test, freshly to interrogate facts in the endeavor to discover their law. I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization to-day women faint and little children moan. But what that law may prove to be is not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back.

Habit is a second nature.

The Institution has been devised to afford the means of receiving your children at an early age, almost as soon as they can walk. By this means many of you, mothers and families, will be able to earn a better maintenance or support for your children; you will have less care and anxiety about them, while the children will be prevented from acquiring any bad habits. and gradually prepared to learn the best.

If we don't address the genetic causes of suffering (physical and mental) we will find ourselves in 500 years enjoying material abundance via nanotech, living in a perfect democracy, colonizing space, and still sitting around wondering "Why are we miserable so much of the time? Why can't we all just get along? Why are we not all happy?"

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature.

You are in the same manner surrounded with a small circle of persons... full of desire. They demand of you the benefits of desire... You are therefore properly the king of desire. ...equal in this to the greatest kings of the earth... It is desire that constitutes their power; that is, the possession of things that men covet.

The precepts "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you" ... are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions-such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, "as the fruit from the tree." ... What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: "Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other"-but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep. ... Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation - because he is speaking with 78 million voices.

Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions. Thus, it is an easy matter for him who carefully examines past events to foresee future events in a republic and to apply the remedies employed by the ancients, or, if old remedies cannot be found, to devise new ones based upon the similarity of the events. But since these matters are neglected or not understood by those who read, or, if understood, remain unknown to those who govern, the result is that the same problems always exist in every era.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ...Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

The kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves.

Someone within me is struggling to lift a great weight, to cast off the mind and flesh by overcoming habit, laziness, necessity. I do not know from where he comes or where he goes. I clutch at his onward march in my ephemeral breast, I listen to his panting struggle, I shudder when I touch him.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

The days .... come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Aristotle whilst he labours to refute the ideas of Plato, falls upon one himself: for his summum bonum, is a Chimera, and there is no such thing as his Felicity.

It is the sidereal day, that is, the duration of the rotation of the earth, which is the constant unit of time. ...However ...many astronomers ...think that the tides act as a check on our globe, and that the rotation of the earth is becoming slower and slower. Thus would be explained the apparent acceleration of the motion of the moon...

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx's concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".

The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself...it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.

"For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy." (XIV, 24) Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? ... "The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection-all obviously states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence." (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add that thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself.

When we come to think about the several benefits in regard to their cause, how have they arisen? Have they arisen out of hate of others and injuring others? Of course we should say no. We should say they have arisen out of love of others and benefiting others. If we should classify one by one all those who love others and benefit others, should we find them to be partial or universal? Of course we should say they are universal. Now, since universal love is the cause of the major benefits in the world, therefore Mozi proclaims universal love is right. And, as has already been said, the interest of the magnanimous lies in procuring benefits for the world and eliminating its calamities. Now that we have found out the consequences of universal love to be the major benefits of the world and the consequences of partiality to be the major calamities in the world; this is the reason why Mozi said partiality is wrong and universality is right.

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

When your father is alive, observe his will. When your father is dead observe his former actions. If, for three years after the death of your father you do not change from the ways of your father, you can be called a 'real son'.

Reason in man is rather like God in the world.

Life is short, but its ills make it seem long.

There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiring as that of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.

The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.

The present stage redefines the possibilities of man and nature in accordance with the new means available for their realization.

That there is a common cause, an that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are the most fully realized-that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed - we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Here the institution that compels is the state, the only purpose of which is to protect individuals from one another and the whole from external enemies. Some German philosophasters of this mercenary age would like to twist it into an institution for education and edification in morality; in the background of this lurks the Jesuitical purpose of eliminating personal freedom and the individual's personal development in order to make him into a mere cog in a Chinese machine of state and religion. But this is the path by which in the past one has arrived at the inquisitions, burning of heretics, and religious wars; Frederick the Great's pledge, 'In my country, each shall be able to tend to his salvation in his own fashion', indicated that he never wanted to tread that path.

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

Animals are rational; in most of them logos is imperfect, but it is certainly not wholly lacking. So if, as our opponents say, justice applies to rational beings, why should not justice, for us, also apply to animals?

The point is that philosophy is seen to have come full circle, and to have exhausted itself.