Dionysius the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, he replied, "God forbid that it should ever befall me!"

God functions like a stabilizer of time.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

The weapon of the Republic is terror, and virtue is its strength.

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

People do not go into the company of their fellow-creatures for what would seem a very sufficient reason, namely, that they have something to say to them, or something that they want to hear from them; but in the vague hope that they may find something to say.

The necessity of speaking, the predicament of having nothing to say, and the desire for tact are three things that can turn the greatest man into a laughingstock.

It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.

The law of habit exhibits a striking contrast to all physical laws in the character of its commands. A physical law is absolute. What it requires is an exact relation. Thus, a physical force introduces into a motion a component motion to be combined with the rest by the parallelogram of forces; but the component motion must actually take place exactly as required by the law of force. On the other hand, no exact conformity is required by the mental law. Nay, exact conformity would be in downright conflict with the law ; since it would instantly crystallise thought and prevent all further formation of habit. The law of mind only makes a given feeling more likely to arise. It thus resembles the "non-conservative" forces of physics, such as viscosity and the like, which are due to statistical uniformities in the chance encounters of trillions of molecules.

A whole from necessary substances is impossible. The whole, therefore, of substances is a whole of contingent things, and the world consists essentially of only contingent things.

If your parent is just, revere him; if not, bear with him.

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

He laid it down as a maxim, that monarchy was the basis of all good government and the nearer to monarchy any government approached, the more perfect it was, and vice versa; and he certainly in his wildest moments, never had so far forgotten the nature of government, as to argue that we ought to wish for a constitution that we could alter at pleasure, and change like a dirty shirt. He was by no means anxious for a monarchy with a dash of republicanism to correct it. But the French constitution was the exact opposite of the English in every thing, and nothing could be so dangerous as to set it up to the view of the English, to mislead and debauch their minds.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

We need not suppose that when po+B40wer resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.

French schoolchildren can be proud to become citizens of the country that gave the world the Declaration of the Rights of Man; need they be told that it was disregarded a few years after it inspired the revolution in Haiti, whose leader, Toussaint Louverture, was consigned to death in a French prison?

Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called "wise women." Let them be killed.

The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.

There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language.

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

Let thy mind rule thy tongue!

I do not believe in what is often called... 'exact terminology'... [or] in definitions... [they] do not... add to exactness... I especially dislike pretentious terminology and... pseudo-exactness concerned with it.

I might try to save the view that 'future contingents' have no truth value by saying that even present-tense statements have no truth value if they refer to the outcome of events that are so far away that a causal signal informing me of the outcome could not have reached me-now without traveling faster than light. In other words, I might attempt saying that statements about events that are in neither the upper half nor the lower half of my light-cone have no truth value. In addition, statements about events in the upper half of my light-cone have no truth value, since they are in my future according to every coordinate system. So only statements about events in the lower half of my light-cone have a truth value; only events that are in 'my past* according to all observers are determined.

Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone several changes, but mainly in a theoretic sense. In practice, society has retained the primitive motive in dealing with the offender; that is, revenge.

What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus, with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or Venus, guilty of thy Follies.

The Institution has been devised to afford the means of receiving your children at an early age, almost as soon as they can walk. By this means many of you, mothers and families, will be able to earn a better maintenance or support for your children; you will have less care and anxiety about them, while the children will be prevented from acquiring any bad habits. and gradually prepared to learn the best.

The real sin - perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission - is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal - that is, a heretic - is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

It would be better to be without the Shu-King than to believe every word of it.

All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

There are men and gods, and beings like Pythagoras.

A sovereign shows himself to be a tyrant if he disregards his honest advisors, or punishes them for what they have said.

By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.