Fundamentally we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of anomie and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. …We seek community in different ways. There's a right wing... and... a left wing version of this.

The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness. A statement of the author's "connection principle."

The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler.

Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.

I am not alone in my fear, nor alone in my hope, nor alone in my shouting. A tremendous host, an onrush of the Universe fears, hopes, and shouts with me. I am an improvised bridge, and when Someone passes over me, I crumble away behind Him.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'

Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion-our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.

Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead. 

Just as when a man commits suicide ne negates the body, this rational limit of subjectivity, so when he lapses into fantastic and trascendental practice he associates himself with embodied divine and ghostly appearances, namely, he negates in practise the difference between imagination and perception.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

A person must take care to exercise moderate discipline over the body and subject it to the Spirit by means of fasting, vigils, and labor. The goal is to have the body obey and conform - and not hinder - the inner person and faith. Unless it is held in check, we know it is the nature of the body to undermine faith and the inner person.

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

I assert(1) There is no method of discovering a scientific theory.(2) There is no method of ascertaining the truth [i.e., verification] of a scientific hypothesis...(3) There is no method of ascertaining whether a hypothesis is 'probable', in the sense of the probability calculus.

The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with the analogy that he is through with searching any further.

Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free--nor error servile--but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.

One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there. The state is founded on the-slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost.

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them...the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world and to pay attention to man.

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.

Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.

My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them. Socrates speaking to Alcibiades

She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, ... or internal difficulties.

It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times.

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane - yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) - either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled!

Take away your opinion, and there is taken away the complaint. Take away the complaint, and the hurt is gone.

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left.

But if we judge only those things which are in our power to be good or bad, there remains no reason either for finding fault with God or standing in a hostile attitude to man.