To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

It is difficult to speak of the universal specifically.

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.

In fact, when a nation has become free, it is extremely difficult to persuade them that their freedom is only to be preserved by perpetual and minute jealousy. They do not observe that there is a constant, perhaps an unconscious, effort on the part of their governors to diminish, and so ultimately to destroy, that freedom.

In Germany there is much complaining about my "eccentricities." But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been "eccentric." That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me — it was the most severe test of my character.

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.

Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those that were faced down in the 20th century.

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

I have taken pains to make my distinction of icons, indices, and tokens clear, in order to enunciate this proposition: in a perfect system of logical notation signs of these several kinds must all be employed. Without tokens there would be no generality in the statements, for they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning. ... But tokens alone do not state what is the subject of discourse ; and this can, in fact, not be described in general terms ; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion? "Can a Scientific Community Be Stable?,"

The 'intense life' advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption.

Death takes the mean man with the proud; The fatal urn has room for all.

Abolish competition and replace it with association.

Himmler approved the idea of recruiting divisions of the Waffen-SS with volunteers from all nations under the banner of the struggle against Communist Russia and in defence of Europe and its civilisation. This was the restoration of the function that the Order of Teutonic Knights had in the beginning as guardian of the East and, at the same time, of the spirit that had animated the Freikorps, the voluntary groups that, on their own initiative, had fought against the Bolsheviks in the eastern regions and the Baltic countries after the end of the First World War. In the end, more than seventeen nations were represented in the Waffen-SS, often with their own complete divisions: French, Belgians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Ukrainians, Spaniards, even Swiss, with a total of about 800,000 men, of whom only a part came from the Germanic area.

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.

We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.

The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.

Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

One principle, that I believe is wanting in you, and all our too fervent and impetuous reformers, is the thought, that almost every institution or form of society is good in its place, and in the period of time to which it belongs. How many beautiful and admirable effects grew out of Popery and the monastic institutions, in the period, when they were in their genuine health and vigour! To them we owe almost all our logic and our literature. What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry! In this point of view, nothing can, perhaps, be more worthy of our applause than the English constitution.

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.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem, when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root, but for man the root is man himself. The clear proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its political energy, is that it proceeds from the decisive positive abolition of religion.

The historical world, in so far as it is built, organized, and shaped by the conscious activity of thinking subjects, is a realm of mind. But the mind is fully realized and exists in its true form only when it indulges in its proper activity, namely, in art, religion, and philosophy.

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another.

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

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.

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.

One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

Happy is the one in whom there is true sorrow over his sin, so that the extreme unimportance to him of everything else is only the negative expression of the confirmation that one thing is unconditionally important to him, so that the unconditional unimportance to him of everything else is a deadly sickness that still is very far from being a sickness unto death but is precisely unto life, because the life is in this, that one thing is unconditionally important to him: to find forgiveness.

This provides us with our first major clue to the solutions of the problem. Even if the left cannot see the world as full of potentiality, it can hold on to the moments of insight and refuse to let go of them. If I know that present difficulties will end in triumph, I am un-discourageable; I merely have to know it intellectually. And if I can 'know' that reality actually has a third dimension, I shall never fall into the mistake of complaining that there is nothing new under the sun and that life is futile.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.

Probably, the most-often-repeated lesson in history is that foreigners who are called in to help one side in a civil war take over for themselves. It is a lesson that seems never to be learned despite endless repetition.

Kant [...] stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge [...] to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that "error is life and knowledge is death," because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish.

The other big issue is an emotional one. We tend to feel the greatest bonds of solidarity with people that are close to us. There are very few true citizens of the world. We're citizens of individual countries and we really feel the closest bonds to people that live within our nation, and therefore... the nation becomes a kind of social glue. But if you're going to make a national identity compatible with liberalism, it has to be the right kind of national identity. It has to be one that is open to all of the citizens that actually live in the territory of the nation. It can't exclude certain groups by race, by ethnicity, by religious belief and the like, and therefore it needs to be an open identity that is based on essentially liberal ideas.

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.