The great work of the present for every man, and every organization of men, who would improve social conditions, is the work of education - the propagation of ideas. It is only as it aids this that anything else can avail. And in this work every one who can think may aid - first by forming clear ideas himself, and then by endeavoring to arouse the thought of those with whom he comes in contact.

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

...a monarchy is a thing perfectly susceptible of reform; perfectly susceptible of a balance of power; and that, when reformed and balanced, for a great country, it is the best of all governments. The example of our country might have led France, as it has led him, to perceive that monarchy is not only reconcilable to liberty, but that it may be rendered a great and stable security to its perpetual enjoyment.

Kierkegaard's individualistic interpretation of 'the negation of philosophy' inevitably developed a fierce opposition to Western rationalism. .... According to Kierkegaard, the individual is not the knowing but only the 'ethically existing subjectivity.' The sole reality that matters to him is his own 'ethical existence'.

The recognition by one person of another's personality takes place by means to some extent identical to the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second personality itself, enters within the direct consciousness of the first person, and is immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the second is perceived.

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us; they had not only orders to cut off several nations altogether, but if they were obliged to war with others, and conquered them, to cut off every male; they were suffered to use polygamy and divorces, and other things utterly unlawful to us under clearer light.

Live always in the best company when you read.

T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.

Is it not the interest of the human race, that every one should be so taught and placed, that he would find his highest enjoyment to arise from the continued practice of doing all in his power to promote the well-being, and happiness, of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, party, country or colour?

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

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

A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.

I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition! But they behave to me in order that I may become the ignoramus and the fool of Italy...

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.

If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it. For let thy efforts be -

I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a "crisis." We have lived through Sputnik (when we were "falling behind the Russians"), through the era of "Johnny can't read," and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.

Savage - There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.

No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge. ... This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature ... without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

But the other conception, namely the infusion of the soul, it is piously and suitably believed, was without any sin, so that while the soul was being infused, she would at the same time be cleansed from original sin and adorned with the gifts of God to receive the holy soul thus infused. And thus, in the very moment in which she began to live, she was without all sin.

That power should be exercised over any portion of mankind without any obligation of consulting them, is only tolerable while they are in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state. In any civilized condition, power ought never to be exempt from the necessity of appealing to the reason, and recommending itself by motives which justify it to the conscience and feelings, of the governed.

As a rule, begin my lectures on Scientific Method by telling my students that scientific method does not exist. ...having been ...the one and only professor of this non-existent subject within the British Commonwealth.

The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

There are three relations [between thee and other things]: the one to the body which surrounds thee; the second to the divine cause from which all things come to all; and the third to those who live with thee.

Had there not been a natural goodness and indestructible force in my father, I see not how be could have bodied himself forth from these mean impediments. I suppose good precepts were not wanting. There was the Bible to read. Old John Orr, the schoolmaster, used from time to time to lodge with them; be was religious and enthusiastic (though in practice irregular with drink). In my grandfather, also, there seems to have been a certain geniality; for instance, he and a neighbor, Thomas Hogg, read "Anson's Voyages;" also tho "Arabian Nights," for which latter my father, armed with zealous conviction, scrupled not to censure them openly. By one means and another, at an early age he had acquired principles, lights that not only flickered, but shone steadily to guide his way.

The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. ... Psychologically, the father is ... replaced by the world of things.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.

Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.

I have distinctly announced the grounds upon which I regard the Apostle John as the only teacher of true Christianity:-namely, that the Apostle Paul and his party, as the authors of the opposite system of Christianity, remained half Jews, and left unaltered the fundamental error of Judaism as well as of Heathenism, which we must afterwards notice. For the present the following may be enough: -It is only with John that the philosopher can deal, for he alone has respect for Reason, and appeals to that evidence which alone has weight with the philosopher-the internal. "If any man will do the will of him that sent me, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." But this Will of God, accord ing to John, is, that we should truly believe in God, and in Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. The other promulgators of Christianity, however, rely upon the external evidence of Miracle, which, to us at least, proves nothing.

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

Whatever can be done another day can be done today.

Now, apparently, many men are again feeling homesick for the herd. They devote themselves passionately to whatever there is left in them of the sheep. They want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool, and the head down. This is the reason why so many European peoples are looking for a shepherd and a sheep dog.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated. 

The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious-it makes little or no difference.

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.