If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.

On the left you had a different aspect of individual autonomy that was pushed to an extreme, which really had to do with the autonomy that individuals have to create their own lifestyles. ...The basic concept of liberal autonomy has to do with your ability to make moral choices, but as time went on the emphasis came to be not on making the right moral choices within an existing moral framework, but rather to be able to make up that framework on your own, that that was the ultimate expression of individual human freedom, and it has obvious problems for a society because all societies have to be based on shared norms that allow people to coordinate their actions, to communicate, and the like... If you believe that the rules can be... set by anybody and that transgressing existing rules is automatically a good thing, you're not going to have... a stable society.

Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

The goal to be reached is the mind's insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary, ... because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is - for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.

Scilurus on his death-bed, being about to leave four-score sons surviving, offered a bundle of darts to each of them, and bade them break them. When all refused, drawing out one by one, he easily broke them,-thus teaching them that if they held together, they would continue strong; but if they fell out and were divided, they would become weak.

The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me."

To farm is to be placed absolutely.

The kingdom, its states, and its families, may be perfectly ruled; dignities and emoluments may be declined; naked weapons may be trampled under the feet; but the course of the Mean cannot be attained to.

I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden- "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

The whole world is in some ways better than it's ever been in the past. And, indeed, I think for many people the meaning of their lives really depends on that belief. If you strip out that belief in progress, if you start thinking of the world in the way in which the ancient pre-Christian Europeans did, or the Buddhists and the Hindus or the Taoists of China do, many people think that's a kind of despair. I don't know how many times I've been told "If I thought that, John, I wouldn't get up in the morning" and "If I agreed with you, John, that history had no pattern of that kind, I wouldn't get up in the morning." I said, "Well, stay in bed a bit longer, you might find a better reason for getting up."

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

O Fortune, cruellest of heavenly powers, why make such game of this poor life of ours?

The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

If it is not true, it is a good story.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted-and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book-to write a history of madness itself. Itself.

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.

So rolling time changes the seasons of things. What was of value, becomes in turn of no worth.

We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.

The demagogues, impresarios of alteracion, who have already caused the death of several civilizations, harass men so that they shall not reflect, see to it that they are kept herded together in crowds so that they cannot reconstruct their individuality in the one place where it can be reconstructed, which is in solitude.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his "dwelling in the daylight of truth," and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of "closet logic," and a deep unconsciousness that there is any other light to dwell in or any other objects to survey with it.

Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,-Sleep before Death."

The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.

In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem.

The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, 'spleen.' The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its 'absurdity' and 'perverseness,' as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject's sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way-service for a purpose.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy.

We shall, therefore, assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system.

At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional...Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer...This idea popularized by Professor Singer - that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species - is one whose time appears to have come...What we're seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others...animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda.

I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.

Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche.

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

Some words shall herein be capitalised when used, not as vernacular, but as terms defined. Thus an "idea" is the substance of an actual unitary thought or fancy; but "Idea," nearer Plato's idea of ἰδέα, denotes anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it.

Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.

If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good.

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.