I posit myself as rational, that is, as free. In doing so I have the representation of freedom. In the same undivided act I posit other free beings. Hence, I describe through my power of imagination a sphere of freedom, which these many separate beings divide amongst themselves. I do not ascribe to myself all the freedom which I have posited, because I must also posit other free beings, and must ascribe part of it to them. Thus, in appropriating freedom to myself, I at the same time restrict myself, by leaving freedom to others.

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.

Most of the propositions that make up the body of administrative theory today share, unfortunately, this defect of proverbs. For almost every principle one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

She with one breath attunes the spheres, And also my poor human heart.

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature - this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.

I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly as good as man-period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors.

Even when there is no law, there is conscience.

The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution - particularly the Socialist idea - is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party. Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice.

A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.

We must fight those who are committed to destruction, without replicating their destructiveness. Understanding how to fight in this way is the task and the bind of a nonviolent ethics and politics.

Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man's place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness.

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

If the sensation that precedes the present by half a second were still immediately before me, then on the same principle, the sensation preceding that would be immediately present, and so on ad infinitum. Now, since there is a time [period], say a year, at the end of which an idea is no longer ipso facto present, it follows that this is true of any finite interval, however short.

You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

...there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that which believed itself in the ascendant.

Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

Answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy.

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

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...

I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

When some one boasted that at the Pythian games he had vanquished men, Diogenes replied, "Nay, I defeat men, you defeat slaves."

All government - indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act - is founded on compromise and barter.

A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.

And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that the consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it. Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being.

Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.