To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle. For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

I propose in this inquiry to take nothing for granted, but to bring even accepted theories to the test of first principles, and should they not stand the test, freshly to interrogate facts in the endeavor to discover their law. I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization to-day women faint and little children moan. But what that law may prove to be is not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back.

This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.

Take heed not to be transformed into a Caesar, not to be dipped in the purple dye, for it does happen. Keep yourself therefore, simple, good, pure, grave, unaffected, the friend of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong for your proper work. Wrestle to be the man philosophy wished to make you. Reverence the gods, save men. Life is brief; there is but one harvest of earthly existence, a holy disposition and neighborly acts.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

Pure mathematics is religion.

We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

Movement in direct experience is alteration in the qualities of objects, and space as experienced is an aspect of this qualitative change. Up and down, back and front, to and fro, this side and that- or right and left- here and there, feel differently. The reason they do is that they are not static points in something itself static, but objects in movement, qualitative changes of value. For "back" is short for backwards and front for forwards. So with velocity. Mathematically there are no such things as fast and slow. They mark simply greater and less on a number scale. As experienced they are qualitatively as unlike as noise and silence, heat and cold, black and white. To be forced to wait a long time for an important event to happen is a length very different from that measured by the movements of the hands of a clock. It is something qualitative.

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

One indeed is the Creator of all things, but many are the creative powers revolving in the heavens; we must, therefore, place the influence of the Sun as intermediate with respect to each single operation affecting the earth. Moreover, the principle productive of Life is vastly superabundant in the Intelligible World; our world, also, is evidently full of generative life. It is therefore clear that the life-producing power of the sovereign Sun is intermediate between these two, since the phenomena of Nature bear testimony to the fact; for some kinds of things the Sun brings to perfection, others of them he brings to pass, others he regulates, others he excites, and there exists nothing that, without the creative influence of the Sun, comes to light and is born.

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Therefore create me! You, the most esteemed, cultured public, are in possession of nervus rerum gerendarum [the moving force to accomplish something]. Just a word from you, a promise to purchase what I write, or, if it is possible, so that everything can be in order immediately, a little advance payment, and I am an author; I shall remain one as long as this favor lasts.

I hope I shall never live to see Anarchism become thoroughly respectable, for then I shall have to look for a new ideal.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

It's funny the respectable names you can give to superstition.

Here then is what we understand by these words: "the equalization of the classes." It would perhaps have been better to say suppression of the classes, the unification of society by the abolition of economic and social inequality. But we have also demanded the equalization of the individuals, and it is there especially that we attract all the thunderbolts of outraged eloquence from our adversaries. One has made use of that part of our proposition to prove in a conclusive manner that we are nothing but communists.

I find that the whiter my hair becomes the more ready people are to believe what I say.

If it does not upset, it is not philosophy.

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence, I owe him a noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he exclusively that determined on educating me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself honorably forth into new generations.

Thus to the Lord doth Asha, the Truth, reply:"No guide is known who can shelter the world from woe, None who knows what moves and works Thy lofty plans."

This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them.

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

The good King of France desires only that you would take his word and let him be quiet till he has got the West Indies into his hands and his grandson well established in Spain, and then you may be sure you shall be as safe as he will let you be in your religion, property and trade, to all which who can be such an infidel as not to believe him a great friend?

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.

In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem.

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

For what is it that everyone is seeking? To live securely, to be happy, to do everything as they wish to do, not to be hindered, not to be subject to compulsion.

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

All natural philosophers, who wished to proceed mathematically in their work, have hence invariably (although unknown to themselves) made use of metaphysical principles, and must make use of such, it matters not how energetically they may otherwise repudiate any claim of metaphysics on their science.