A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

Take not thine enemy for thy friend; nor thy friend for thine enemy!

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.

Humanists today, who claim to take a wholly secular view of things, scoff at mysticism and religion. But the unique status of humans is hard to defend, and even to understand, when it is cut off from any idea of transcendence. In a strictly naturalistic view - one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm - there is no hierarchy of value with humans at the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with their own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.

Historical time knows no lasting present.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. 

To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

As thou thyself art a component part of a social system, so let every act of thine be a component part of social life. Whatever act of thine that has no reference, either immediately or remotely, to a social end, this tears asunder thy life, and does not allow it to be one, and it is of the nature of a mutiny, just as when in a popular assembly a man acting by himself stands apart from the general agreement.

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

All large political questions are at bottom economic questions.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

The woman wants to dominate, the man wants to be dominated.

If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

Unjust dominion cannot be eternal.

Little can be hoped for from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.

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

When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. ... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.

To be sure, risks abound; but no one is proposing compassionate stewardship of ecosystems by philosophers. Humans are capable of choosing our own future pain-sensitivity too; but any species-wide genomic shift in human pain tolerance will depend on the willingness of prospective parents to use preimplantation genetic screening.

The right-minded man, ever inclined to righteous and lawful deeds, is joyous day and night, and strong, and free from care. But if a man take no heed of the right, and leave undone the things he ought to do, then will the recollection of no one of all his transgressions bring him any joy, but only anxiety and self-reproaching.

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

The only progress I can see is progress in the organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.

Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet.

In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile which is unproductive, and still more so, if instead of grapes and olives it yield but the thistle and thorns of dispute and contention.

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation, and the first step towards co-operation lies in the hearts of individuals.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the following about Severus (a person who is not clearly identifiable according to the footnote): Through him I became acquainted with the conception of a community based on equality and freedom of speech for all, and of a monarchy concerned primarily to uphold the liberty of the subject.

Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. ... Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.

Reorganisation, irrespectively of God or king, by the worship of Humanity, systematically adopted. Man's only right is to do his duty. The Intellect should always be the servant of the Heart, and should never be its slave.

What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.

One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.

The recurrence of relations-not of elements-in different contexts, which constitutes transposition is qualitative and hence directly experienced in perception.

The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don't know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a "we" and not an "I." Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I'm doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history.

The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us.