The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

The Vedas contain a sensible account of God." "The veneration in which the Vedas are held is itself a remarkable feat. Their code embraced the whole moral life of the Hindus and in such a case there is no other truth than sincerity. Truth is such by reference to the heart of man within, not to any standard without.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Only charity admitteth no excess. For so we see, aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell.

Whenever you say anything good about East Germany, immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you're a Stalinist..." I'm not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did.

Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself.

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.

We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our window to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.

One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief. If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.

The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

An old fairy tale has it that science began with the rejection of superstition. In fact it was the rejection of rationalism that gave birth to scientific inquiry. Ancient and medieval thinkers believed the world could be understood by applying first principles. Modern science begins when observation and experiment come first, and the results are accepted even when what they show seems to be impossible.

The merits of democracy are negative: it does not insure good government, but it prevents certain evils.

You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.

No one knows what he can do till he tries.

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that Man, is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for, he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

Art expresses, it does not state; it is concerned with existences in their perceived qualities, not with conceptions symbolized in terms.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points - romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence. These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.

Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more.

The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. ... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.

It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.

The entire process seems simple and natural, i.e., possesses the naturalness of a shallow rationalism.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. [...] In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

All things are subject to decay and change.

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

One of the roots of the problem is the focus of environmentalists. The conservation movement, for one hundred years, has, at least in this country, focused on wilderness preservation-places of spectacular rocks and waterfalls-at the expense of what I would call the "economic landscapes" of farming, forestry, and mining.

And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.

This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere-that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.

First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to formulate them without use of what would be intuitively recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions.

The politician may change sides so frequently as to find himself always in the majority, but most politicians have a preference for one party to the other, and subordinate their love of power to this preference.

We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?

No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this.