The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,-O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of a humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

The, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

The one absolutely, the Intelligible, the ever Preexisting, comprehending all the universe together within the One - nay, more, is not the whole world One living thing - all and everywhere full of life and soul, perfect and made up out of parts likewise perfect? Now of this double unity the most perfect part (I mean of the Unity in the Intelligible World that comprehends all things in One, and of the Unity encompassing the Sensible World, that brings together all things into a single and perfect nature) is the perfection of the sovereign Sun, which is central and single, and placed in the middle of the intermediate Powers.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Variant: Good communication is just as stimulating as...

While both are dear, Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?

The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.

Life is our dictionary.

What one has to say to begin with is that, as humans, we are limited in intelligence and we really have no reliable foresight. So none of us will come up with answers to the whole great problem. What we can do is judge our behavior, our history, and our present situation by a better standard than "efficiency" or "profit," or those measures that we're still using to determine economic decisions.

The free will, the actual motor of reason in society, necessarily creates wrong. The individual must clash with the social order that claims to represent his own will in its objective form. But the wrong and the 'avenging justice' that remedies it not only expresses a 'higher logical necessity,' but also prepare the transition to a higher social form of freedom, the transition from abstract right to morality. For, in committing a wrong, and in accepting punishment for his deed, the individual becomes conscious of the 'infinite subjectivity' of his freedom. He learns that he is free only as a private person.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in-whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually-agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.

People who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, Be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings.

The absurd ... is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence of Descartes' methodical doubt. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion ... Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

To say that a life is grievable is to claim that a life, even before it is lost, is, or will be, worthy of being grieved on the occasion of its loss; the life has value in relation to mortality. One treats a person differently if one brings the sense of the grievability of the other to one's ethical bearing toward the other. If an other's loss would register as a loss, would be marked and mourned, and if the prospect of loss is feared, and precautions are thus taken to safeguard that life from harm or destruction, then our very ability to value and safeguard a life depends upon an ongoing sense of its grievability-the conjectured future of a life as an indefinite potential that would be mourned were it cut short or lost.

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act.

He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

I do not know, my listener, what your crime, your guilt, your sins are, but surely we are all more or less of the guilt of loving only little. Take comfort, then, in these words just as I take comfort in them.

It makes no sense to regard the right of suffrage as a utopian product of fantasy, cut loose from social reality. And it is for this reason that it is not a serious instrument of the proletarian dictatorship. It is an anachronism, an anticipation of the juridical situation which is proper on the basis of an already completed socialist economy, but is not in the transition period of the proletarian dictatorship.

That, on the whole, if you have got the intrinsic qualities, you have got everything, and the preliminaries will prove attainable; but that if you have got only the preliminaries, you have yet got nothing. A man of real dignity will not find it impossible to bear himself in a dignified manner; a man of real understanding and insight will get to know, as the fruit of his very first study, what the laws of his situation are, and will conform to these.

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

The church is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

A Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is always voyd.

When one rational being affects another rational being as mere matter, then the lower sense of that being is also affected, it is true, and is so affected necessarily and altogether independently of the freedom of that being, (as the lower sense is indeed always affected;) but it is not to be assumed that this affection was in the intention of the person who produced it. His intention was merely to attain his purpose, to express his conception in matter, and he never took into consideration whether that matter would feel it or not. Hence, the reciprocal influence of rational beings upon each other, as such, always occurs by means of the higher sense; for only the higher sense is one which cannot be affected without having been presupposed. Our criterion of this reciprocal influence remains, therefore, correct.

A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, "Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?".... Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.

The political freedom of conscience and of the press, so far from being as it is commonly supposed an extension, is a new case of the limitation of rights and discretion. Conscience and the press ought to be unrestrained, not because men have a right to deviate from the exact line that duty prescribes, but because society, the aggregate of individuals, has no right to assume the prerogative of an infallible judge, and to undertake authoritatively to prescribe to its members in matters of pure speculation.

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

The fundamental maxim of those who stand at the head of this Age, and therefore the principle of the Age, is this,-to accept nothing as really existing or obligatory, but that which they can understand and clearly comprehend. With regard to this fundamental principle, as we have now declared and adopted it without farther definition or limitation, this third Age is precisely similar to that which is to follow it, the fourth, or age of Reason as Science,-and by virtue of this similarity prepares the way for it. Before the tribunal of Science, too, nothing is accepted but the Conceivable. Only in the application of the principle there is this difference between the two Ages,-that the third, which we shall shortly name that of Empty Freedom, makes its fixed and previously acquired conceptions the measure of existence; while the fourth-that of Science-on the contrary, makes existence the measure, not of its acquired, but of its desiderated beliefs.