All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.

There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.

Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. p. 149

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

Be kind. Don't kill for any reason. Don't even kill out of self-defense. Really - I mean that. Don't take any more than you need of anything. Help others.

It is asserted that beasts have no rights; the illusion is harboured that our conduct, so far as they are concerned, has no moral significance, or, as it is put in the language of these codes, that "there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals." Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism. In philosophy, however, it rests on the assumption, despite all evidence to the contrary, of the radical difference between man and beast,-a doctrine which, as is well known, was proclaimed with more trenchant emphasis by Descartes than by any one else: it was indeed the necessary consequence of his mistakes.

Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul-nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

It is by the Imperial Capital that contemporaries (and posterity, too) judge an Empire, and its magnificence impresses them mightily and leads them to judge the Emperor a great man and hero, even though it may all be based on robbery, and though the provinces of the Empire may be sunk in misery.

To prove cannot mean anything other than to bring the other person to my own conviction. The truth lies only in the unification of "I" and "You." The Other of pure thought, however, is the sensuous intellect in general. In the field of philosophy, proof therefore consists only in the fact that the contradiction between sensuous intellect and pure thought is disposed, so that thought is true not only for itself but also for its opposite.

Guilt has to be understood not only as a way of checking one's own destructiveness, but as a mechanism for safeguarding the life of the other, one that emerges from our own need and dependency, from a sense that this life is not a life without another life. Indeed, when it turns into a safeguarding action, I am not sure it should still be called "guilt." If we do still use that term, we could conclude that "guilt" is strangely generative or that its productive form is reparation.

To this I answer: That force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force. Whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation, both from God and man...

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

All moral tradeoffs are messy. However, on some fairly modest ethical assumptions, when a severe and irreconcilable conflict of interests occurs, then the interests of the more sentient take precedence over the less sentient. This rule of thumb holds regardless of the age, race or species of the victim. Reply to "Why is David Pearce a vegan and a negative utilitarian given industrial agriculture's decimation of insect populations and, therefore, suffering the greater number of insects than farm animals? Shouldn't insects outweigh farm animals?

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

It is all too easy to forget that there are emotional motivations in history, as well as economic ones.

The question here is the same as the question I addressed with regard to madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality. In all of these cases, it was not a question of showing how these objects were for a long time hidden before being finally discovered, nor of showing how all these objects are only wicked illusions or ideological products to be dispelled in the light of reason finally having reached its zenith. It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices-from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth-was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, etcetera), nonetheless become something.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'

Great novelists are philosopher novelists, that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

You can take better care of your secret than another can.

Oh. Marx's love for Shakespeare! It is well known. Chris Hani shared the same passion. I have just learned this and I like the idea. Even though Marx more often quotes Timon of Athens, the Manifesto seems to evoke or convoke, right from the start, the first coming of the silent ghost, the apparition of the spirit that does not answer, on those ramparts of Elsinore which is then the old Europe.

I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequently a priori. Arithmetic thus becomes simply a development of logic, and every proposition of arithmetic a law of logic, albeit a derivative one. To apply arithmetic in the physical sciences is to bring logic to bear on observed facts; calculation becomes deduction.

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the Source of the Intelligible and Creative Powers, which direct the visible ones; she that gave birth to and copulated with the mighty Jupiter: she that exists as a great goddess next to the Great One, and in union with the Great Creator; she that is dispenser of all life; cause of all birth; most easily accomplishing all that is made; generating without passion; creating all that exists in concert with the Father; herself a virgin, without mother, sharing the throne of Jupiter, the mother in very truth of all the gods; for by receiving within herself the causes of all the intelligible deities that be above the world, she became the source to things the objects of intellect.

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement. As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Ch. 9. Battle of the Sexes

Before making a decision the first thing to do - don't get worked up. For everything happens according to the nature of all things, and in a short time you'll be nobody and nowhere even as the great emperors Hadrian and Augustus are now. The next thing to do - consider carefully the task at hand for what it is, while remembering that your purpose is to be a good human being. Get straight to doing what nature requires of you, and speak as you see most just and fitting - with kindness, modesty, and sincerity.

Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

How can the Universe tell its own story save by making use of human speech; how convey its meanings to finite minds save by employing a thinker to declare them? So long as the story remains unspoken, unwritten, can we say it exists at all? Does not the significance of things become a story by the very process which ends in the movement of an intelligently guided pen over a sheet of paper, in the reading of printed types, in the utterance of recognised vocables; and until this process has been accomplished is not the "meaning" a mere promise or unrealized potency? Can we learn the history of the world, and of human life, otherwise than by reading, or hearing it spoken? How, then, can we receive it without the intermediation of a writer, a speaker?

Against the diseases of the mind, philosophy provides sufficient antidotes. The instruments which it employs for this purpose are the virtues; the root of which, whence all the rest proceed, is prudence. This virtue comprehends the whole art of living discreetly, justly, and honorably, and is, in fact, the same thing with wisdom. It instructs men to free their understandings from the clouds of prejudice; to exercise temperance and fortitude in the government of themselves: and to practice justice towards others. Although pleasure, or happiness, which is the end of living, be superior to virtue, which is only the means, it is every one's interest to practice all the virtues; for in a happy life, pleasure can never be separated from virtue.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

Whensoever hostile aggressions...require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

"How then shall they have the play-games you allow them, if none must be bought for them?" I answer, they should make them themselves, or at least endeavour it, and set themselves about it. ...And if you help them where they are at a stand, it will more endear you to them than any chargeable toys that you shall buy for them.

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

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

In the North they are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion. In the South they are fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.