It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production.

When Alexander the Great addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, Diogenes replied "Yes, stand a little out of my sunshine."

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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

The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.

What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.

National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

Students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one.

Some say that the body is the "tomb" of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life; and again, because by its means the soul gives any signs which it gives, it is for this reason also properly called "sign". But I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the "safe" for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed.

A real man is he whose goodness is a part of himself.

Stir up thy mind, and recall thy wits again from thy natural dreams, and visions, and when thou art perfectly awoken, and canst perceive that they were but dreams that troubled thee, as one newly awakened out of another kind of sleep look upon these worldly things with the same mind as thou didst upon those, that thou sawest in thy sleep.

A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.

Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the Earth more and more. I don't know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the Earth taken from the Moon. We don't need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Them that die will be the lucky ones!

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

"...the church of England, when she baptizes any one, makes him not a Christian [...] the church of England is mistaken, and makes none but socinians Christians"

Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.

Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us.

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.

When I was a student I was assigned "Mythologies" and "A Lover's Discourse," by Roland Barthes, and felt at once that something momentous had happened to me, that I had met a writer who had changed my course in life somehow; and looking back now, I think he did.

We should like to represent... the... universe, and... feel... we understood it. We... never can attain this representation: our weakness is too great. But... we desire... to conceive an infinite intelligence... which should see all, and... classify all in its time, as we classify, in our time, the little we see. ...This supreme intelligence would be only a demigod; infinite in one sense... limited in another, since it would have... imperfect recollection of the past... otherwise all recollections would be equally present... and for it there would be no time.

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America. I can add with truth, that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul.

In fact, when a nation has become free, it is extremely difficult to persuade them that their freedom is only to be preserved by perpetual and minute jealousy. They do not observe that there is a constant, perhaps an unconscious, effort on the part of their governors to diminish, and so ultimately to destroy, that freedom.

From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to ayme thereby, at any Good to himself.

Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.

The cravings of love and sex are met with absolute ignorance by the majority of parents, who consider it as something indecent and improper, something disgraceful, almost criminal, to be suppressed and fought like some terrible disease. The love and tender feelings in the young plant are turned into vulgarity and coarseness through the stupidity of those surrounding it, so that everything fine and beautiful is either crushed altogether or hidden in the innermost depths, as a great sin, that dares not face the light.

Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright.

The pleasure is only for a little moment, and it [passes] like a dream, and a man at the end thereof finds death through knowing it.