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.

And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.

They [theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence.

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

But if one Subject giveth Counsell to another, to do anything contrary to the Lawes, whether that Counsell proceed from evil intention, or from ignorance onely, it is punishable by the Common-wealth; because ignorance of the Law, is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the Lawes to which he is subject.

Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process...

Origen, of course, is also a great advocate of the allegorical approach. Yet I think you will have to admit that our modem theologians either despise this method of interpretation or are completely ignorant of it. As a matter of fact they surpass the pagans of antiquity in the subtlety of their distinctions.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.

Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.

Since the law is good, the will, which is hostile to it, cannot be good.

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

"He who exalts himself shall be humbled; and he who humbles himself shall be exalted." (Matthew 23:12) The person who exalts himself ... will be humbled, because a person who considers himself to be good, intelligent, and kind will not even try to become better, smarter, kinder. The humble person will be exalted, because he considers himself bad and will try to become better, kinder, and more reasonable.

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

Men grew desperate and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed.

Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason.

Experience teaches only the teachable...

For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.

As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them.

Money, then, appears as this overturning power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence and intelligence into idiocy.

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."

It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

Socrates: I think the most likely view is, that these ideas exist in nature as patterns, and the other things resemble them and are imitations of them; their participation in ideas is assimilation to them, that and nothing else.Parmenides: It is impossible that anything be like the idea, or the idea like anything; for if they are alike, some further idea, in addition to the first, will always appear, and if that is like anything, still another, and a new idea will always be arising, if the idea is like that which partakes of it.

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

Not far from the invention of fire... we must rank the invention of doubt.

It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary - we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.

Beneficence is a duty. He who often practices this, and sees his beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love him whom he has benefited. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," this does not mean, "Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of love (in the next place) do him good"; but: "Do good to thy neighbour, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men (as a settled habit of inclination to beneficence)."

It is only through science and art that civilization is of value. Some have wondered at the formula: science for its own sake; an yet it is as good as life for its own sake, if life is only misery; and even as happiness for its own sake, if we do not believe that all pleasures are of the same quality...Every act should have an aim. We must suffer, we must work, we must pay for our place at the game, but this is for seeing's sake; or at the very least that others may one day see.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?

We are inclined to overemphasize the material influences in history. The Russians especially make this mistake. Intellectual values and ethnic influences, tradition and emotional factors are equally important. If this were not the case, Europe would today be a federated state, not a madhouse of nationalism.

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.

I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.