Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached.

Women will be no longer made the slaves of, or dependent upon men ... They will be equal in education, rights, privileges and personal liberty.

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

Little is needed to ruin and upset everything, only a slight aberration from reason.

The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.

The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

The true is the whole.

When the Superior Man (Junzi) eats he does not try to stuff himself; at rest he does not seek perfect comfort; he is diligent in his work and careful in speech. He avails himself to people of the Tao and thereby corrects himself. This is the kind of person of whom you can say, "he loves learning."

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

...an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas.

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.

Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time.

Either one defines "personality" and "individuality" in terms of their possibilities within the established form of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence; in this case, their realization would imply transgression, beyond the established form of civilization, to radically new modes of "personality" and "individuality" incompatible with the prevailing ones. Today, this would mean "curing" the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr.

How I wish I didn't know anything about myself and this world!

I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous... Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.

Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I'm a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I use: I try to figure out what's at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that's not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital.

Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster

Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

It is surely delightful, Sir, to look forward to that period when a series of liberal and prudent measures shall have delivered islands, so highly favoured by the bounty of Providence, from the curse inflicted on them by the frantic rapacity of man. Then the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle.

They [men] have corrupted this [God's supernatural] order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us.

Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound.

There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are: Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval; Civil equality, as the right of the citizen to recognize no one as a superior among the people in relation to himself...; and Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

Complete, at the same time, was his confidence in his own judgment when it spoke to him decisively. He was one of those few that could believe and know as well as inquire and be of opinion. When I remember how much he admired intellectual force, how much he had of it himself, and yet how unconsciously and contentedly he gave others credit for superiority, I again see the healthy spirit of the genuine man.

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.

A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.

It is manifest... that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

My friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers.