Certainly one may, with as much reason and decency, plead for murder, robbery, lewdness, and barbarity, as for this practice: They are not more contrary to the natural dictates of Conscience, and feelings of Humanity; nay, they are all comprehended in it.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

When at first thought we think of a creator our ideas appear to us undefined and confused; but if we reason philosophically, those ideas can be easily arranged and simplified. It is a Being, whose power is equal to his will.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived", but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious. It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

The "hard law of value," the "law set in stone"-when it abandons us, what sadness, what panic! This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods, because they revive something of the violence necessary to life-whether suffered or inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good! It is clear, luminous, the relations of force, contradictions, exploitation, repression! This is lacking today, and the need for it makes itself felt.

Unlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfilled - negative utilitarianism seems achievable in full.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention,-the old with a slightly new turn.

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention.

Reason is immortal, all else mortal.

A young man should serve his parents at home and be respectful to elders outside his home. He should be earnest and truthful, loving all, but become intimate with humaneness. After doing this, if he has energy to spare, he can study literature and the arts.

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.

Liberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.

None can be free who is a slave to, and ruled by, his passions.

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Law could never, by determining exactly what is noblest and must just for one and all, enjoin upon them that which is best; for the differences of men and of actions and the fact that nothing, I may say, in human life is ever at rest, forbid any science whatsoever to promulgate any simple rule for everything and for all time. So, that which is persistently simple is inapplicable to things which are never simple.

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

A multitude is irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference. ... the compact identities of factory workers in the dominant countries have been undermined with the rise of short-term contracts and forced mobility of new forms of work; how migration has challenged traditional notions of national identity; how family identity has changed and so forth.

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

Old forms of government finally grow so oppressive, that they must be thrown off even at the risk of reigns of terror.

Aristodemus, a friend of Antigonus, supposed to be a cook's son, advised him to moderate his gifts and expenses. "Thy words," said he, "Aristodemus, smell of the apron."

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.

Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.

Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.

That passivity was the essence of the problem. The human being was intended to be passive only in a condition of fatigue, and not always then. Too much passivity of body produced surplus fat, short-windedness, indigestion: passivity of mind produced the same symptoms on the mental level. a feeling of spiritual dyspepsia. Since the average human being has no purposes that are not connected with the activities of keeping alive, the black room was bound to produce passivity, increasing dullness, a state in which the mind is at once awake and static, motionless, stagnant. This sense of dullness was nothing less than the collapse of the sense of reality and of values, the retreat into one's inner world.

All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.

Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is a work of design, and though they assuredly disbelieve that it can have an Author and Governor who is absolute in power as well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience; and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective Deity of those, who think themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering and so deformed by injustice as ours.

If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment- If you can embrace this without fear or expectation-can find fulfillment in what you're doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)-then your life will be happy.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

I need not tell you, what complaints the more candid and judicious of the Chymists themselves are wont to make of those boasters, that confidently pretend, that they have extracted the salt or sulphur of quicksilver, when they have disguised it by additaments, wherewith it resembles the concretes, whose names are given it; whereas by a skilful and rigid examen, it may be easily enough stripped of its disguises, and made to appear again in the pristine form of running mercury. The pretended salts and sulphurs being so far from being elementary parts extracted out of the body of mercury, that they are rather... de-compound bodies, made up of the whole metal and the menstruum, or other additaments employed to disguise it.

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

His disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."