Pure justice emerges from symmetry applied human life, and human beings as ends in themselves.

They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.

It is my own experience ... that commentators are far more ingenious at finding meaning than authors are at inserting it.

My master Attalus used to say: "Evil herself drinks the largest portion of her own poison." The poison which serpents carry for the destruction of others, and secrete without harm to themselves, is not like this poison; for this sort is ruinous to the possessor.

When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total.

I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?

That of beaver skins, of beaver wool, and of gum Senega, has been subjected to higher duties; Great Britain, by the conquest of Canada and Senegal, having got almost the monopoly of those commodities.

Over the years it has become my firm opinion that sexual activity (even if only through masturbation) is "requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul"; for men and women alike. It stimulates your glands, exercises your pelvis, thrills your nerves, brings mind and body together as one, and culminates in an ecstasy in which there is neither past nor future nor separation between self and other. We need that as we need vitamins, proteins, water, and air.

What is a rebel? A man who says no. 

Do you seek Alcides' equal? None is, except himself.

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes-our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all. 

Better that the nation grow poor for a cause we can honor, than grow rich for an end that is unknown. Who can regard without deep misgiving the process of accumulating wealth unaccompanied by a corresponding growth of knowledge as to the uses to which wealth must be applied? This is what we see in normal times, and the spectacle is profoundly disturbing. Far less disturbing at all events is that process of spending the wealth which we have now to witness.

The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.

Of things that are external, happen what will to that which can suffer by external accidents. Those things that suffer let them complain themselves, if they will; as for me, as long as I conceive no such thing, that that which is happened is evil, I have no hurt; and it is in my power not to conceive any such thing.

Virtue is the same for a man and for a woman.

Does the light of a lamp shine and keep its glow until its fuel is spent? Why shouldn't your truth, justice, and self-control shine until you are extinguished?

To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.

It seems to me that the current political task in a society like ours is to criticize the working of institutions that are apparently the most neutral and independent, to criticize these institutions and attack them in such a way that the political violence that exercises itself obscurely through them becomes manifest, so that one can fight against them.

The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat,' than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.

When you read God's Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking - this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness. Not a single one of those to whom the cause of Christianity in the higher sense has been entrusted forgot to urge this again and again as most crucial, as unconditionally the condition if you are to come to see yourself in the mirror.

What happens to one man may happen to all.

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.

By a tranquil mind I mean nothing else than a mind well ordered.

Well, it was healthy to miss once in a while. It kept self-confidence balanced at a point safely short of arrogance.

Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life.

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.

As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death,-which sort was the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected."

Zeal to do all that is in one's power is, in truth, a proof of piety.

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. from Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia,

Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.

Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.