If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a "barbarous relic," one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English - and not Danish, German, or French - is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.

A good man with a good conscience doesn't walk so fast.

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

Think on this doctrine,-that reasoning beings were created for one another's sake; that to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without intending it.

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

God has given to all things their course and decided how high and how far they may go, not higher, not lower.

Every good thing is gentle and consistent, progressing in good order and not going beyond what is right.

So the wise man will develop virtue, if he may, in the midst of wealth, or, if not, in poverty; if possible, in his own country-if not, in exile; if possible, as a commander-if not, as a common soldier; if possible, in sound health-if not, enfeebled. Whatever fortune he finds, he will accomplish therefrom something noteworthy.

The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. ... But by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. ... Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.

One of the major problems of our society is that so many people are too intelligent to accept religion, but not intelligent or strong-minded enough to look for acceptable alternatives; in the same way, many people are strong-minded enough not to want to be 'organization men', but incapable of seeing beyond an act of protest. These situations produce a sense of being 'between two stools', lacking real motive; a sense of mental strain is produced that may find its outlet in violence, or in organised anti-social behaviour.

The future use and the whole effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in this cause... For we must not deceive ourselves: whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long. And if the Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually, of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is valuable in it. For this process is the cement which binds the whole together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what England is.

The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

The organism does not have a point of view: the person or creature does.

Without narration, life is purely additive.

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.

The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

It is not by the consolidation or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution that good government is effected.

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.

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and "to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil." Think of Aesop's goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy.

Now, what is 'unrighteousness' in practice? It is in practice behavior of a kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by arranging an elaborate system of ethics around this conception, the herd justifies itself in wreaking punishment upon the objects of its own dislike, while at the same time, since the herd is righteous by definition, it enhances its own self-esteem at the very moment when it lets loose its impulse to cruelty. This is the psychology of lynching, and of the other ways in which criminals are punished. The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.

I will begin to speak when I am not going to say what were better left unsaid.

Octavia lost Marcellus, whom both his father-in-law and his uncle had begun to depend upon, and to place upon his shoulders the weight of the empire - a young man of keen intelligence and firm character, frugal and moderate in his desires to an extent which deserved especial admiration in one so young and so wealthy, strong to endure labour, averse to indulgence, and able to bear whatever burden his uncle might choose to lay, or I may say to pile upon his shoulders. Augustus had well chosen him as a foundation, for he would not have given way under any weight, however excessive.

My immediate consciousness, my absolute perception, cannot go beyond myself, - I have immediate knowledge only of myself, whatever I know further I know only by reasoning, in the same manner in which I have come to those conclusions concerning the original powers of Nature, which certainly do not lie within the circle of my perceptions. I, however, - that which I call myself, - am not the man-forming power of Nature, but only one of its manifestations ; and only of this manifestation am I conscious, not of that power, whose existence I have only discovered from the necessity of explaining my own.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

Only geometry can hand us the thread [which will lead us through] the labyrinth of the continuum's composition, the maximum and the minimum, the infinitesimal and the infinite; and no one will arrive at a truly solid metaphysic except he who has passed through this [labyrinth].

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

To no one but the Son of Heaven does it belong to order ceremonies, to fix the measures, and to determine the written characters.

Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?

Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only so long as it actually circulates.

A screen bans reality.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.

For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received no offence at all.

The division of Philosopher and Poet is only apparent, and to the disadvantage of both. It is a sign of disease, and of a sickly constitution.

The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.