The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or, lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values.The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood - these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society - the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction.

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited ... and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.

With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as "Enlightenment values". But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed.

Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.

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

Thought is led, by the situation of its objects, to measure their truth in terms of another logic, another universe of discourse. And this logic projects another mode of existence: the realization of the truth in the words and deeds of man. And inasmuch as this project involves man as societal animal," the polis, the movement of thought has a political content. Thus, the Socratic discourse is political discourse inasmuch as it contradicts the established political institutions. The search for the correct definition, for the "concept" of virtue, justice, piety, and knowledge becomes a subversive undertaking, for the concept intends a new polis.

Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.

If you wish to extinguish that enthusiasm, which inspires great thoughts, and impels to noble enterprises;-if you wish to render men's hearts cold, and unfeeling; and to substitute egotism in the room of generous, and ardent, patriotism,-if you wish to do this, only take away from the people their faith, and make them philosophers.

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

The modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere.

Demonstrating is therefore only the means through which I strip my thought of the form of "mine-ness" so that the other person may recognize it as his own.

Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.

In a word, the mass of the people counts for nothing in every political creation. A people even respects a government only because it is not its own creation. This feeling is engraved on its heart in profound characters. It submits to sovereignty because it senses that it is something sacred it can neither create nor destroy. If, as a consequence of corruption and perfidious suggestions, this preventive sentiment is somehow effaced, if it has the misfortune of believing itself called as a body to reform the State, all is lost. This is why, even in free States, it is extremely important that the men who govern be separated from the mass of the people by that personal respect stemming from birth and wealth.

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.

The noblest people are those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death.

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.

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.

I possess no weapon but love. With that I have come to do battle. Help me!

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you both your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.

Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

[Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now - and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there. ... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs.

It is a proof that the state is not an arbitrary invention, but is established by nature and reason, when we actually find that, in places where men have lived together for a time and have become educated, states are erected, although the people in the one such place know not that the same thing has been done in other places. Each people, which does not live in a condition of nature, but has a government, no matter how constituted, has a right to compel its recognition from all adjoining states.

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

A great pilot can sail even when his canvas is rent.

The Africans had that claim on our humanity which could not be resisted, whatever might have been advanced by an hon. gentleman in defence of the property of the planters.

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? - how far? - how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern."