Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ.

The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.

Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.

Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent.

What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

I... believe in the rationalist tradition of a commonwealth of learning, and in the urgent need to preserve this tradition.

So rolling time changes the seasons of things. What was of value, becomes in turn of no worth.

We ought to regard the interests of the state as of far greater moment than all else, in order that they may be administered well; and we ought not to engage in eager rivalry in despite of equity, nor arrogate to ourselves any power contrary to the common welfare. For a state well administered is our greatest safeguard. In this all is summed up: When the state is in a healthy condition all things prosper; when it is corrupt, all things go to ruin.

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate."

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

You are a little soul carrying a corpse around, as Epictetus used to say.

The spirit of Poesy is the morning light, which makes the Statue of Memnon sound.

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

With an ignorant man thou shouldst not become a confederate and associate.

I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.

We later learned that all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment had been killed. When the plane had hit the water a hole had been made in the plane and the water had rushed in. I had told a friend at Oslo who was finding me a place that he must find me a place where I could smoke, remarking jocularly, 'If I cannot smoke, I shall die'. Unexpectedly, this turned out to be true.

A gifted noble people; a people of wild strong feelings, and of iron restraint over these: the characteristic of noble-mindedness, of genius.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment.

If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.

Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

The Democratic Party is beyond redemption at this point when it comes to seriously speaking to the needs of poor and working people... The neofascism that's escalating is predicated on the rottenness of a system in which the Democratic Party facilitates that frustration and desperation because it can't present an alternative... If America is unable to present an alternative to the Democratic Party, then we're going fascist.

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.

Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason's inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only "understand" what is past what neither remove it nor "rejuvenate it" ... have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind's impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume's famous dictum that "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions," that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason's uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world's appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man's faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness - the old hen pan, "the all is one" - either a single source or a single ruler.

The customs of that most criminal nation have gained such strength that they have now been received in all lands. The conquered have given laws to the conquerors.

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.

The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying. And there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to verify.

The wiser nations are, the more public spirit they possess, the more perfect their political constitution, the fewer constitutional laws they have, for these laws are only props, and a building only needs props when it has become out of plumb or when it has been violently shaken by an external force. The most perfect constitution of antiquity was without contradiction that of Sparta, and Sparta has not left us a single line of its public law. It justly boasted of having written its laws only in the hearts of its children.

Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people the ancient Greeks, for instance more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

By committing a crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law.The need for punishment is not satisfied where, as is generally the case, the penal code is merely a method of exercising pressure through fear.

Let them have what instructions you will, and ever so learned lectures of breeding daily inculcated into them, that which will most influence their carriage will be the company they converse with, and the fashion of those about them.

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

You won't - I really believe - get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.

Democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail.