Men are what their mothers made them.

I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it...

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest. 9:37-38 (KJV)

When the qualification to vote is regulated by years, it is placed on the firmest possible ground, because the qualification is such as nothing but dying before the time can take away; and the equality of Rights, as a principle, is recognized in the act of regulating the exercise. But when Rights are placed upon, or made dependent upon property, they are on the most precarious of all tenures. "Riches make themselves wings, and fly away," and the rights fly with them ; and thus they become lost to the man when they would be of most value.

When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred.

The superior man accords with the course of the Mean. Though he may be all unknown, unregarded by the world, he feels no regret. It is only the sage who is able for this.

For the world to become philosophic amounts to philosophy's becoming world-order reality; and it means that philosophy, at the same time that it is realized, disappears.

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

There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.

The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the Divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting. Oh, yes, my friend, we have been judged, and condemned, too, and this is not Heaven, but hell.

Liars ... when they speak the truth they are not believed.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Each the herald is who wrote His rank, and quartered his own coat. There is no king nor sovereign state That can fix a hero's rate.

Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule to you tell a copy from an original?'

Let me mention another requirement for a better understanding of Holy Scripture. I would suggest that you read those commentators who do not stick so closely to the literal sense. The ones I would recommend most highly after St. Paul himself are Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Too many of our modern theologians are prone to a literal interpretation, which they subtly misconstrue.

We thus have a kind of see-saw: first, pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

The male has more teeth than the female in mankind, and sheep, and goats, and swine. This has not been observed in other animals.

I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; - perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?

Doing what is for the good of the people, this must be the truest criterion of right government, in accordance with which the wise and good man will govern the affairs of his subjects. Just as the captain of a ship keeps watch for what is at any moment for the good of the vessel and the sailors, not by writing rules, but by making his science his law, and thus preserves his fellow voyagers, so may not a right government be established in the same way by men who could rule by this principle, making science more powerful than the laws? And whatever the wise rulers do, they can commit no error, so long as they maintain one great principle and by always dispensing absolute justice to them with wisdom and science are able to preserve the citizens and make them better than they were, so far as that is possible.

In the vaunted works of Art The master stroke is Nature's part.

Printing will tell you such useful things and such interesting things that not being able to read would be as bad as not being able to see.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. 13:33 (KJV)

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

...the impossible must be supposed in order to explain the superdetermination of the event

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

The weapon of criticism obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem, when it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root, but for man the root is man himself. The clear proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its political energy, is that it proceeds from the decisive positive abolition of religion.

We are not so absurd as to propose that the teacher should not set forth his own opinions as the true ones and exert his utmost powers to exhibit their truth in the strongest light. To abstain from this would be to nourish the worst intellectual habit of all, that of not finding, and not looking for, certainty in any teacher. But the teacher himself should not be held to any creed; nor should the question be whether his own opinions are the true ones, but whether he is well instructed in those of other people, and, in enforcing his own, states the arguments for all conflicting opinions fairly.

Leave the ass burdened with laws behind in the valley. But your conscience, let it ascend with Isaac into the mountain.

Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest single work of political thought in the English language. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, p. 1

What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. [...] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. [...] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Those of our pleasures which come most rarely give the greatest delight.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

But Aversion wee have for things, not only which we know have hurt us; but also that we do not know whether they will hurt us, or not.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

By 'arguing...' I mean... criticizing... inviting... criticism; and trying to learn from it.

All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end. First Thesis Variant translations: All natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end. All natural capacities of a creature are destined to develop themselves completely and to their purpose.

To no one but the Son of Heaven does it belong to order ceremonies, to fix the measures, and to determine the written characters.

Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of the employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced.

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.