To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

All things are changing; and thou thyself art in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction and the whole universe to.

Men must be governed by those laws which they love. Where thirty millions are to be governed by a few thousand men, the government must be established by consent, and must be congenial to the feelings and to the habits of the people. That which creates tyranny is the imposition of a form of government contrary to the will of the governed: and even a free and equal plan of government, would be considered as despotic by those who desired to have their old laws and their ancient system.

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

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.

Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old.

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.

Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.

Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

The invention and spread of contraceptives is the proximate cause of our changing morals. The old moral code restricted sexual experience to marriage, because copulation could not be effectively separated from parentage, and parentage could be made responsible only through marriage. But to-day the dissociation of sex from reproduction has created a situation unforeseen by our fathers. All the relations of men and women are being changed by this one factor; and the moral code of the future will have to take account of these new facilities which invention has placed at the service of ancient desires.

You seem to consider the federal judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions, a very dangerous doctrine, indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have with others the same passions for the party, for power and the privilege of the corps. Their power is the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

Today, status quo bias runs deep. Conservation biology is an ideology masquerading as a science. Many researchers seek to extend the tenets of conservation biology to humans. By contrast, a benevolent superintelligence might view Darwinian life on Earth as an infestation of biological malware and act accordingly. The amount of suffering caused by Homo sapiens is hard to quantify. But the suffering is immense and growing daily with the spread of industrialised animal abuse. Reply to "Why would someone want to end humanity?"

As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other. ... Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.

Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.

It is so by nature that the plant will develop with regularity, that the animal will move purposefully, and that human beings will think. Why should I take exception to recognizing also the last as the expression of an original force of nature, as I do the first and the second?

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

Whoever criticizes others must have something to replace them. Criticism without suggestion is like trying to stop flood with flood and put out fire with fire. It will surely be without worth.

People don't stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. They don't stop playing tennis just because they turn 40, they don't stop with sex just because they turn 40; they keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing.

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself.

It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.

Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter and jump over all the rest by saying that matter is eternal.

Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view.

In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

Hearken with your ears to these best counsels,Reflect upon them with illumined judgment.Let each one choose his creed with that freedom of choice each must have at great events.

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence.

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community-for example, another country or historical period. ... It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.

All the Good of mortals is mortal.