Academics from the United Kingdom

"I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have broken the glass of the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long"

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars."

"Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination — for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets."

"We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation ... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began."

"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor — but they have few followers now."

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

"If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him."

"Somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many."

"There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love."

"Khedron was content with the order of things as it was. True, he might upset that order from time to time—but only by a little. He was a critic, not a revolutionary. On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples; he shrank from diverting its course."

"There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come."

"The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths. The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken."

"After a while Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on the ascertainable facts."

"All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest."

"It is not my duty as an historian to predict the future, only to observe and interpret the past. But its lesson is clear enough; we have lived too long out of contact with reality, and now the time has come to rebuild our lives."

"He had discharged his destiny; now, perhaps, he could begin to live."

"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge ... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command ... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young."

"Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it."

"Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal."

"As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying."

"Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."

"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system."

"Our age is in many ways unique, full of events and phenomena that never occurred before and can never happen again. They distort our thinking, making us believe that what is true now will be true forever, though perhaps on a larger scale. Because we have annihilated distance on this planet, we imagine that we can do it once again. The facts are otherwise, and we see them more clearly if we forget the present and turn our minds towards the past."

"When the pioneers and adventurers of our past left their homes in search of new lands, they said good-bye forever to the place of their birth and the companions of their youth. Only a lifetime ago, parents waved farewell to their emigrating children in the virtual certainty that they would never meet again. And now, within one incredible generation, all this has changed."

"We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints."

"To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away — and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles."

"Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it — for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other? So it will be with us as we spread out from Earth, loosening the bonds of kinship and understanding, hearing faint and belated rumors at second — or third — or thousandth hand of an ever dwindling fraction of the entire human race. Though the Earth will try to keep in touch with her children, in the end all the efforts of her archivists and historians will be defeated by time and distance, and the sheer bulk of material. For the numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time. We have left the realm of comprehension in our vain effort to grasp the scale of the universe; so it must ever be, sooner rather than later."

"When you are next out of doors on a summer night, turn your head towards the zenith. Almost vertically above you will be shining the brightest star of the northern skies — Vega of the Lyre, twenty-six years away at the speed of light, near enough to the point of no return for us short-lived creatures. Past this blue-white beacon, fifty times as brilliant as our sun, we may send our minds and bodies, but never our hearts. For no man will ever turn homewards beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth."

"Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

"Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

"Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas: Every revolutionary idea — in science, politics, art, or whatever — seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:(1) "It's completely impossible — don't waste my time"; (2) "It's possible, but it's not worth doing"; (3) "I said it was a good idea all along.""

"I am afraid that this chapter will amply demonstrate the truth of Clarke's 69th Law, viz., "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive."

"We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins."

"We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish."

"The rash assertion that 'God made man in His own image' is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths, and as the hierarchy of the universe is disclosed to us, we may have to recognize this chilling truth: if there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods."

"One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic — hardware and technology — to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later."

"Perhaps our role on this planet is not to worship God — but to create Him."

"The Ramans do everything in threes."

"… we have a situation in which millions of vehicles, each a miracle of often unnecssary complication, are hurtling in all directions under the impulse of anything up to 200 horsepower. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys — yet often carry a single passenger. They can travel at a hundred miles an hour, but are lucky if they average forty. In one lifetime they have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale."

"This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one."

"Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them."

"Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it."

"“I am the King.” Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones — scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago — was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects."

"Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa's heaven was only an illusion."

"I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me."

"The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason. If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues."

"Meanwhile, among all its countless other effects upon human culture, Starglider had brought to its climax a process that was already well under way. It had put an end to the billions of the words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries."

"There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations."

"Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction."

"Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor ... Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done — and was about to do."

"One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again."

"The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred meters to go. He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment."

"Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!"

"Plans for the final assault on Big Brother had already been worked out and agreed upon with Mission Control. Leonov would move in slowly, probing at all frequencies, and with steadily increasing power — constantly reporting back to Earth at every moment. When final contact was made, they would try to secure samples by drilling or laser spectroscopy; no one really expected these endeavours to succeed, as even after a decade of study TMA-1 resisted all attempts to analyse its material. The best efforts of human scientists in this direction seemed comparable to those of Stone Age men trying to break through the armour of a bank vault with flint axes."

"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there."

"I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives — pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge — when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics."

"I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent."

"I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind? And, although I do not necessarily agree with the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's advocacy of evolution as a major proof of the glory of God, de Chardin's attitude is both logical and inspiring. A creator who laid the foundations for the entire future at the beginning of time is far more awesome than a clumsy tinkerer who constantly modifies his creations and throws away entire species in the process."

"The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime."

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."

"CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power."

"It is later than you think. May it not be true for this Sundial."

"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here."

"“My system saves lives!” Crane sighed and took a long pull from his bottle. “Few would consider that a compelling argument, doctor. Saving money is more to peoples tastes.”"

"“Civilization exists,” Crane said, “by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”"

"“The nature of life is struggle, doctor,” Brother Ishmael said. Crane stopped walking and addressed the man. “And the nature of man is to try and rise above the struggle.” “To deny God!” Ishmael persisted. “To make a better world.”"

"So many people did it that it was no longer an obsession; it was a demographic."

"“I’m giving you an order, lady.” “You’ve probably seen how well I respond to orders,” she said. “Look, you may as well save your breath.”"

"Another cheer. He turned to Newcombe. “Still think I’m crazy?” “Crazy for trying,” the man said. “Brilliant for succeeding.”"

"People don't know what's good for them; they only know what they want. I learned to keep my expectations low a long time ago. It's good advice for anyone."

"Man's bodily functions moved only toward death, but the mind could continue to enrich itself even as everything else embraced entropy."

"Thinkers prepare the revolution; bandits carry it out."

"“That’s what I think they’re doing, eating themselves alive. They murder in the name of God and blindly destroy the very ecosystem that sustains them.” “People are people.” Bert shrugged. “What you’re really saying is that people are animals,” Crane replied. “And I say to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a civilization, a real civilization, built on real understanding of ourselves and our universe.”"

"Crane, I love you, but you're bullheaded and blind when you want to be. You preach tolerance, politeness, but you do the same thing everyone else does—you try and build some cumulative tally of pain and loss, then compete to see who got hurt more. You can't base your relationship with the world on that."

"His mistake was that he traded gods, science for Allah, and hence, traded goals without knowing it. He is as much a manufactured product of his religion as I am of mine, and as much a victim of it. But this is not about victims. Everybody's a victim. That's what Kate Masters prompted me to remember. Before it's done, we all lose everyone and everything that was ever important to us, and then we lose ourselves. We've got to get beyond our own victimhood and take the long view, the view to what we leave behind and what follows us."

"Years compress like fault lines in the mind. While everything else changes, the mind remembers exactly what it wants to remember. A decade can be lost and a year seem like forever."

"A depressing thought occurred to him, soon after he had started exploring - much of the time in fast-forward - these relics of the past. He had read somewhere that by the turn of the century - his century! - there were approximately fifty thousand television stations broadcasting simultaneously. If that figure had been maintained and it might well have increased - by now millions of millions of hours of TV programming must have gone on the air. So even the most hardened cynic would admit that there were probably at least a billion hours of worthwhile viewing... and millions that would pass the highest standards of excellence. How to find these few - well, few million - needles in so gigantic a haystack? The thought was so overwhelming - indeed, so demoralizing - that after a week of increasingly aimless channel surfing Poole asked for the set to be removed. p. 13"

"Within a few days he was being measured for his wings, not in the least like the elegant versions worn by the performers of Swan Lake. Instead of feathers there was a flexible membrane, and when he grasped the hand-holds attached to the supporting ribs, Poole realized that he must look much more like a bat than a bird.... For his first lessons he was restrained by a light harness, so that he did not move anywhere while he was taught the basic strokes - and, most important of all, learned control and stability. Like many acquired skills, it was not quite as easy as it looked. p.27"

"I suppose they can detect sound vibrations - most marine creatures can - though this atmosphere may be too thin to carry my voice very far... Hello, can you hear me? My name is Frank Pool... ahem... I come in peace for all mankind. Makes me feel rather stupid, but can you suggest anything better? And it will be good for the record... Nobody's taking the slightest notice. Big ones and little ones, they're all creeping towards their igloos. Wonder what they actually do when they get there p. 29"

"I've just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction - they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary. p.29"

"People are always asking me why I've devoted my life to such a horrible period of history, and it's not much of answer to say that there were even worse ones.' 'Then why are you interested in my century?' 'Because it marks the transition between barbarism and civilization.'..."

"Of course, we in the so-called developed countries thought we were civilized. At least war wasn't respectable any more, and the United Nations was always doing its best to stop the wars that did break out.' 'Not very successfully: I'd give it about three out of ten...'"

"What we find incredible is the way that people - right up to the early 2000s! - calmly accepted behaviour we would consider atrocious. And believed in the most mindboggled... Nonsense, which surely any rational person would dismiss out of hand.'... 'Examples, please.' 'Well... every year in some countries thousands of little girls were hideously mutilated to preserve their virginity? Many of them died - but the authorities turned a blind eye.' 'I agree that was terrible - but what could my government do about it?' 'A great deal - if it wished. But that would have offended the people who supplied it with oil and bought its weapons, like the landmines that killed and maimed civilians by the thousand.' p.32"

"Then, one day, an unusually tasty dish appeared, which brought back vivid memories of the deer - hunts and barbecues of his youth. However, there was something unfamiliar about both flavour and texture, so Poole asked the obvious question. Anderson merely smiled, but for a few seconds Indra looked as if she was about to be sick. Then she recovered and said: 'You tell him - after we've finished eating.'... 'Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,' Anderson explained. 'Raising animals to - ugh -eat them became economically impossible. I don't know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants... And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques. 'But what finished the whole horrible business was not economics - but disease. It started first with cattle, then spread to other food animals - a kind of virus, I believe, that affected the brain, and caused a particularly nasty death.... Synthetic foods were now far cheaper, and you could get them in any flavour you liked. p.32 -33"

"Above all, there was the memory - and mystery - of Helena... It had begun as a casual affair, in the early days of his astrotraining, but had become more and more serious as the years went by. Just before he had left for Jupiter, they had planned to make it permanent when he returned. And if he did not, Helena wished to have his child. He still recalled the blend of solemnity and hilarity with which they had made the necessary arrangements..."

"Once you asked me about crime nowadays - I said any such interest pathological - maybe prompted by the endless sickening television programmes of your time - never able to watch more than few minutes myself... disgusting!"

"Yes - crime. Always some... Society's irreducible noise level. What to do? Your solution - prisons. State-sponsored perversion factories - costing ten times average family income to hold one inmate! Utterly crazy... Obviously something very wrong with people who shouted loudest for more prisons - They should be psychoanalysed! But let's be fair - really no alternative before electronic monitoring and control perfected - you should see the joyful crowds smashing the prison walls then - nothing like it since Berlin fifty years earlier! p. 39"

"'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You're Commander Poole, of course. But I'm sure we've never met before.'...He was glad of the encounter, and was pleased to know that Danil was back in normal society. Whether his original crime had been axe-murders or overdue library books should no longer be the concern of his one-time employer; the account had been settled, the books closed. p. 73"

"Although Poole sometimes missed the cops-and-robbers dramas he had often enjoyed in his youth, he had grown to accept the current wisdom: excessive interest in pathological behaviour was itself pathological. p. 73"

"Whatever godlike powers and principalities lurked beyond the stars, Poole reminded himself, for ordinary humans only two things were important - Love and Death. p. 87"

"Their little universe is very young, and its god is still a child. But it is too soon to judge them; when We return in the Last Days, We will consider what should be saved. p. 88, Epilogue"

"The search for alien artefacts in the Solar System should be a perfectly legitimate branch of science ('exoarchaeology'?). Unfortunately, it has been largely discredited by claims that such evidence has already been found - and has been deliberately suppressed by NASA! p. 97, Acknowledgements"

"Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. p. 97, Acknowledgements"

"The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons."

"There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in Childhood's End. But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions — each of them claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others — how can someone possibly take any of them seriously? I mean, that's insane. ...Though I sometimes call myself a crypto-Buddhist, Buddhism is not a religion. Of those around at the moment, Islam is the only one that has any appeal to me. But, of course, Islam has been tainted by other influences. The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid."

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."

"The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium."

"We should be less concerned about adding years to life, and more about adding life to years. I have been very fortunate to have witnessed some of humanity's greatest achievements during the 20th century that is nearing its end. Yet we must admit that it has also been the most savage century in the history of our kind. If I can have one more wish, I want to see lasting and meaningful peace achieved in Sri Lanka as early as possible. But I am aware that peace cannot just be wished; it involves hard work, courage and persistence. As we welcome 2001, let us harness our collective energies to create a culture of peace and a land of prosperity."

"The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space ... I'm very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!""

"I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington ... I'm reasonably sure there must be life in this solar system, on Mars or on Europa, and other places. I think life is probably going to be ubiquitous, though we still don't have any proof of that yet — and still less, any proof of intelligent life anywhere. But I hope that will be coming in the next decade or so through radio astronomy or, perhaps, the discovery of objects in space which are obviously artificial. Astronomical engineering — that may be the other thing to look for."

"I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.."

"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."

"The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale."

"SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently."

"I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her."

"2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."

"If children have interests then education happens."

"If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble...But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history."

"What we need is a machine that will let us see the other guy’s point of view."

"A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true."

"Science demands patience."

"What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control."

"Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples."

"If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured."

"The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths."

"Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death..."

"We always thought the living earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery."

"What was the use of wealth and power unless they could be used to shape one’s dreams?"

"He knew something of the emotion the artist must feel when his dreams become reality."

"Why should one be afraid of something merely because it is strange?"

"When I was a boy, Brayldon, my old master once said that time could never destroy the truth—it could only hide it among legends. He was right."

"He had wished to convince himself that Comarre was evil. Now he knew that it was not. There would always be, even in Utopia, some for whom the world had nothing to offer but sorrow and disillusion."

"He was suddenly struck by an idea so brilliant that he was quite sure it could not possibly work."

"News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation."

"It is surprising how long it takes to do a simple addition when your life depends on the answer."

"A single neutron begins the chain-reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives and the toil of generations. Equally insignificant and unimportant are the trigger-events which can sometimes change a man’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of his future."

"Now there are some forms of apparel that may be worn or discarded as the fancy pleases with no other ill effects than a possible loss of social prestige. But spacesuits are not among them."

"“Very ingenious, like all your theories,” said Stormgren. “I wish you’d give them Opus numbers so that I could keep up with them. The objections to this one—”"

"The extremists in his movement had discredited themselves thoroughly, and it would be a long time before the world heard of them again."

"There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed but nothing could be done about good men who were deluded."

"Purvis looked at him as though seeing something that had no right to be around in a world that had invented penicillin."

"I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn’t."

"The future is built on the rubble of the past; wisdom lies in facing that fact, not in fighting against it."

"The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion."

"It was very pleasant to be loved, but it had its disadvantages if one stopped to look beyond the immediate moment. For a fleeting instant Yradne wondered if she had been fair to Jon, to Brant—even to herself. One day the decision would have to be made; it could not be postponed forever. Yet she could not for the life of her decide which of the boys she liked the better; and she did not know if she loved either. No one had ever told her, and she had not yet discovered, that when one has to ask “Am I really in love?” the answer is always “No”."

"There are some things that no amount of pure intelligence can anticipate, but which can only be learned by bitter experience."

"It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love."

"Yet it was the impression that the unknown master has set out to create, Phoenix-like, from the dying embers of a great legend. He had captured, and held for all future ages to see, that beauty whose service is the purpose of life, and it sole justification."

"You won’t be an artist if you live a thousand years. You’re merely an expert, and you know it. Those who can—do, those who can’t—criticise."

"Though I've often made fun of the scientists, they've freed us forever from the stagnation that was overtaking your race."

"Great art and domestic bliss are mutually incompatible. Sooner or later, you'll have to make your choice."

"History, it has been said, never repeats itself but historical situations recur."

"“Censorship does raise some very difficult problems, doesn’t it? I’ve always argued that there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s degree of civilisation and the restraints it puts on its press.” A New English voice from the back of the room cut in: “On that argument, Paris is a more civilised place than Boston.” “Precisely,” answered Purvis. For once, he waited for a reply. “OK,” said the New England voice mildly. “I’m not arguing. I just wanted to check.”"

"Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world."

"Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had no intention of being impressed by any prince, found himself unexpectedly moved by the wide, sad eyes. There were eyes that had seen too many receptions and parades, that had had to watch countless totally uninteresting things, that had never been allowed to stray far from the carefully planned official routes. Looking at that proud but weary face, Captain Saunders glimpsed for the first time the ultimate loneliness of royalty."

"There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can't find it."

"“You’re a gang of robbers,” he said once. “You’re seeing how quickly you can loot this planet of its resources, and you don’t give a damn about the next generation.” “And what,” answered McKenzie, not very originally, “has the next generation ever done for us?”"

"For what is life but organized energy?"

"This sounded promising, and my coefficient of cupidity jumped several points."

"Why should men travel, he asked himself bitterly, across the gulf of stars at such expense and risk—merely to land on a spinning slag heap? For the same reason, he knew, that they had once struggled to reach Everest and the Poles and the far places of the Earth—for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery."

"There was nothing like a museum for calming the mind, for putting the problems of everyday life in their true perspective. Here, surrounded by the infinite variety and wonder of Nature, he was reminded of truths he had forgotten. He was only one of a million million creatures that shared this planet Earth. The entire human race, with its hopes and fears, its triumphs and its follies, might be no more than an incident in the history of the world."

"It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural; everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology."

"The idea of death was utterly incongruous—as it is to all men until the final second."

"Christine would surely be talking, even if she had only an ape as audience. To her, any silence was as great a challenge as a blank canvas; it had to be filled with the sound of her own voice."

"The false logic involved is: “We exist; therefore something—call it X—created us.” Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways. But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the same logic something must have created X—and so on. We are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have no meaning in the real universe."

"Grove was inclined to allow the request. “I can’t see how we can be harmed by allowing the destruction of what I don’t understand anyhow,” he said dryly. “And besides—you say it is your duty, Warrant Officer. I respect that. Time and space may flow like toffee, but duty endures.”"

"We have no idea what waits for us out there. We did not choose this situation, and whatever manner of creature or accident has stranded us here did not take much notice of our welfare. I would say nice moral questions are beside the point, and that pragmatism is the order of the day."

"Eumenes showed little taste for elaborate protocols; he was far too intelligent for that."

"Kolya believed that the Mongols’ expansion was pathological. It was a ghastly spiral of positive feedback, born of Genghis Khan’s unquestioned military genius and fueled by easy conquests, a plague of insanity and destruction that had spread across most of the known world."

"He says that even a god cannot conquer time, but nine hundred years should be enough for anybody."

"You know, we’re not used to secrecy up here. It’s not encouraged. We all have to work together to keep alive. Secrecy is corrosive, Professor, bad for morale."

"This project was no longer mathematics; it was engineering."

"Democracy is our most important possession. If we throw it away when the going gets tough, we might never get it back."

"Such craziness captured media attention, but was fortunately still rare."

"All the religiosity around worries me—doesn’t it you?"

"Slickness of presentation didn’t imply comprehensiveness of knowledge."

"When the pious fools come up against the godless pagans who own Judea, the result is what might be called diplomatic incidents."

"You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?"

"Maybe it’s a mark of a maturing culture, do you think, that secrets aren’t kept, that truth is told, that things are talked out?"

"“You’re not too heavily laden, Professor. What are those documents?” “Star charts,” he said firmly. “The true treasure of our civilization. A few books too—oh, what a horror it was that we were not able to empty the libraries! For once a book is lost to the ice, a little more of our past is gone forever. But as to my personal effects, my pots and pans, I have my own troop of slave bearers to help me with all that. They are called graduate students.”"

"As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!"

"I now spend a good part of my day dreaming of times past, present and future. As I try to survive on 15 hours sleep a day, I have plenty of time to enjoy vivid dreams. Being completely wheel-chaired doesn't stop my mind from roaming the universe — on the contrary!"

"In my time I've been very fortunate to see many of my dreams come true! Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, I never expected to see so much happen in the span of a few decades. We "space cadets" of the British Interplanetary Society spent all our spare time discussing space travel — but we didn't imagine that it lay in our own near future... I still can't quite believe that we've just marked the 50th anniversary of the Space Age! We've accomplished a great deal in that time, but the "Golden Age of Space" is only just beginning. Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will travel to Earth orbit — and then, to the Moon and beyond. Space travel — and space tourism — will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet."

"Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations. I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we've learnt something from the most barbaric century in history — the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalisation..."

"If I may be allowed just three wishes, they would be these. Firstly, I would like to see some evidence of extra-terrestrial life. I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us — or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen — I hope sooner rather than later! Secondly, I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. ... Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can't allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet... The third wish is one closer to home. I've been living in Sri Lanka for 50 years — and half that time, I've been a sad witness to the bitter conflict that divides my adopted country. I dearly wish to see lasting peace established in Sri Lanka as soon as possible."

"I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer — one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well."

"Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society."

"The best proof that there's intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn't come here."

"I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical."

"we hadn't gotten as far as another science fiction writer thought we might have. Arthur Clarke I mean…I was sort of rooting for what he had in mind, the good parts of it anyway...The idea of greater space travel and almost casual space travel. I grew up during the Space Race, during the sixties, and it was a wonderful way of sort of having a way without having one. We could get the technological push, and we could get the combat with the Soviet Union, but we never quite had that nuclear war. Instead we raced each other to the moon, and I guess I see space still as a way to achieve a lot of technological efforts without necessarily hurting anybody."

"One of the English science-fiction writers once said, "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering." ... I must say I agree with him."

"In "Credo," an essay published in 1991, Clarke lays out a belief system by distinguishing between two views of God: Alpha, who "rewards good and evil in some vaguely described afterlife," and Omega, "Creator of Everything … a much more interesting character and not so easily dismissed." Clarke writes, "No intelligent person can contemplate the night sky without a sense of awe. The mind-boggling vista of exploding supernovae and hurtling galaxies does seem to require a certain amount of explaining.""

"It is significant how extremely difficult it has been even for the prophetic writers of science fiction to imagine and accept an unknown future. At the close of Childhood's End, the English author and scientist Arthur Clarke wrote: "The stars are not for men.""

"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion — the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right."

"When an official declares something false, chances are that it is. When he or she says it is absolutely false, chances are it is true. ... The overemphasis sticks out like Pinocchio's nose."

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."

"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

"Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."

"Clarke's Third Law doesn't work in reverse. Given that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," it does not follow that "any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come some time in the future." ... There have admittedly been occasions when authoritative, pontificating skeptics have come away with egg on their faces, even within their own lifetimes. But there have been a far greater number of occasions when magical claims have never been vindicated. An apparent magical claim might eventually turn out to be true. In any age there are so many magical claims that are, or could be, made. They can't all be true; many are mutually contradictory. We have no reason to suppose that, simply by the act of sitting down and dreaming up a magical claim, we shall make it come true in some future technology. Some things that would surprise us today will come true in the future. But lots and lots of things that would surprise us today will not come true ever."

"Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women's chats By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats."

"So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men — especially pipers! And, whether they pipe us from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"

"Kiss me as if you made believe You were not sure, this eve, How my face, your flower, had pursed It's petals up."

"The lie was dead And damned, and truth stood up instead."

"Over my head his arm he flung Against the world."

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest."

"I trust in Nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time. I trust in God,—the right shall be the right And other than the wrong, while he endures. I trust in my own soul, that can perceive The outward and the inward,—Nature's good And God's."

"I judge people by what they might be,—not are, nor will be."

"Sing, riding's a joy! For me I ride."

"It is so horrible, I dare at times imagine to my need Some future state revealed to us by Zeus"

"Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?"

"We loved, sir — used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was — But then, how it was sweet!"

"Who hears music feels his solitude Peopled at once."

"Womanliness means only motherhood; All love begins and ends there."

"Have you found your life distasteful? My life did and does smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I save and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I'll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again."

"I find earth not gray but rosy; Heaven not grim but fair of hue. Do I stoop? I pluck a posy; Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

"Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!"

"What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew."

"A minute's success pays the failure of years."

"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom, shade and shine, — wonder, wealth, and — how far above them —"

"The moment eternal — just that and no more — When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."

"Strive and thrive!"

"Autumn wins you best by this its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay."

"That we devote ourselves to God, is seen In living just as though no God there were."

"Be sure that God Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart."

"I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time."

"Truth is within ourselves."

"God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations."

"Strange secrets are let out by Death Who blabs so oft the follies of this world."

"Error has no end."

"The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung To their first fault, and withered in their pride."

"Every joy is gain And gain is gain, however small."

"Jove strikes the Titans down Not when they set about their mountain-piling But when another rock would crown the work."

"The peerless cup afloat Of the lake-lily is an urn some nymph Swims bearing high above her head."

"I give the fight up: let there be an end, A privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God."

"Progress is The law of life: man is not Man as yet."

"But, gathering in its ancient market-place, Talked group with restless group ; and not a face But wrath made livid, for among them were Death's staunch purveyors, such as have in care To feast him. Fear had long since taken root In every breast, and now these crushed its fruit, The ripe hate, like a wine: to note the way It worked while each grew drunk ! men grave and grey Stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro. Letting the silent luxury trickle slow About the hollows where a heart should be; But the young gulped with a delirious glee Some foretaste of their first debauch in blood At the fierce news"

"over zealous in the feat And stumbling on a peril unaware. Was captive, "trammelled in his proper snare," They phrase it, "taken by his own intrigue""

"The hill-cat boasts some cunning of her own, Some stealthy tricks to better beasts unknown That quick with prey enough her hunger blunts And feeds her fat while gaunt the lion hunts."

"[...]his back is fairly turned? The pair of goodly palaces are burned, The gardens ravaged, and your Guelf is drunk A week with joy ; the next, his laughter sunk In sobs of blood, for he found, some strange way, Old Salinguerra back again; I say Old Salinguerra in the town once more Uprooting, overturning, flame before Blood fetlock-high beneath him; Azzo fled; Who scaped the carnage followed; then the dead Were pushed aside from Salinguerra's throne. He ruled once more Ferrara, all alone. Till Azzo, stunned awhile, revived, would pounce; Coupled with Boniface, like lynx and ounce."

"So men believe And worship what they know not, nor receive Delight from."

"Have they fancies — slow, perchance, Not at their beck, which indistinctly glance Until by song each floating part be linked To each, and all grow palpable, distinct? He pondered this."

"Deeds let escape are never to be done."

"Each a God's germ, but doomed remain a germ In unexpanded infancy"

"Any nose May ravage with impunity a rose."

"Say not "a small event!" Why "small"? Costs it more pain that this ye call A "great event" should come to pass From that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed!"

"The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearl'd; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heaven— All's right with the world!"

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas,— Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas."

"In the morning of the world, When earth was nigher heaven than now."

"All service ranks the same with God,— With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first."

"When is man strong until he feels alone?"

"The heavens and earth stay as they were; my heart Beats as it beat: the truth remains the truth."

"He gathers earth's whole good into his arms; Standing, as man now, stately, strong and wise, Marching to fortune, not surprised by her. One great aim, like a guiding-star, above— Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift His manhood to the height that takes the prize; A prize not near — lest overlooking earth He rashly spring to seize it — nor remote, So that he rest upon his path content: But day by day, while shimmering grows shine, And the faint circlet prophesies the orb, He sees so much as, just evolving these, The stateliness, the wisdom and the strength, To due completion, will suffice this life, And lead him at his grandest to the grave. After this star, out of a night he springs; A beggar's cradle for the throne of thrones He quits; so, mounting, feels each step he mounts, Nor, as from each to each exultingly He passes, overleaps one grade of joy. This, for his own good: — with the world, each gift Of God and man, — reality, tradition, Fancy and fact — so well environ him, That as a mystic panoply they serve — Of force, untenanted, to awe mankind, And work his purpose out with half the world, While he, their master, dexterously slipt From such encumbrance, is meantime employed With his own prowess on the other half. Thus shall he prosper, every day's success Adding, to what is he, a solid strength — An aery might to what encircles him, Till at the last, so life's routine lends help, That as the Emperor only breathes and moves, His shadow shall be watched, his step or stalk Become a comfort or a portent, how He trails his ermine take significance, — Till even his power shall cease to be most power, And men shall dread his weakness more, nor dare Peril their earth its bravest, first and best, Its typified invincibility.Thus shall he go on, greatening, till he ends— The man of men, the spirit of all flesh, The fiery centre of an earthly world!"

"What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:"

"Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf."

"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!"

"God made all the creatures, and gave them our love and our fear, To give sign we and they are his children, one family here."

"How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses Forever in joy!"

"'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!"

"I do what many dream of, all their lives, — Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive — you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat — Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter) — so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine."

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

"Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!"

"If you get simple beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing God invents."

"You should not take a fellow eight years old And make him swear to never kiss the girls."

"I count life just a stuff To try the soul's strength on."

"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?"

"Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be."

"Italy, my Italy! Queen Mary's saying serves for me (When fortune's malice Lost her Calais): "Open my heart, and you will see Graved inside of it ‘Italy.'""

"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist."

"When the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something."

"He said true things, but called them by the wrong names."

"That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it. This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one,— His hundred's soon hit; This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit. That has the world here—should he need the next, Let the world mind him! This throws himself on God, and unperplexed Seeking shall find him."

"Lofty designs must close in like effects."

"Rafael made a century of sonnets."

"Other heights in other lives, God willing."

"God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul-sides,—one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her!"

"Oh their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, Oh their Dante of the dread Inferno, Wrote one song—and in my brain I sing it; Drew one angel—borne, see, on my bosom!"

"Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought."

"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, And hope and fear (believe the aged friend), Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,— How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."

"The body sprang At once to the height, and stayed; but the soul,—no!"

"What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up, And be discharged, and straight wound up anew? No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets: May learn a thousand things, not twice the same."

"For I say this is death and the sole death,— When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, And lack of love from love made manifest."

"The ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!"

"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith, "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!""

"Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all! Not for such hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. Poor vaunt of life indeed, Were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; Such feasting ended, then As sure an end to men."

"Let us cry, "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!""

"Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Now, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, I that: whom shall my soul believe?"

"All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."

"Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure."

"Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup."

"Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men."

"So, take, and use thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"

"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore: Prime nature with an added artistry — No carat lost, and you have gained a ring. What of it? 'T is a figure, a symbol, say; A thing's sign: now for the thing signified."

"A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since. Give it me back! The thing's restorative I'the touch and sight."

"A ring without a posy, and that ring mine?"

"O lyric Love, half angel and half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire, — Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face, — Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart— When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory — to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die, — This is the same voice: can thy soul know change? Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!"

"Go practise if you please With men and women: leave a child alone For Christ's particular love's sake!"

"In the great right of an excessive wrong."

"Was never evening yet But seemed far beautifuller than its day."

"Forgive me this digression — that I stand Entranced awhile at Law's first beam, outbreak O' the business, when the Count's good angel bade "Put up thy sword, born enemy to the ear, "And let Law listen to thy difference!" And Law does listen and compose the strife, Settle the suit, how wisely and how well! On our Pompilia, faultless to a fault, Law bends a brow maternally severe, Implies the worth of perfect chastity, By fancying the flaw she cannot find."

"Oh child that didst despise thy life so much When it seemed only thine to keep or lose, How the fine ear felt fall the first low word "Value life, and preserve life for My sake!""

"What wonder if the novel claim had clashed With old requirement, seemed to supersede Too much the customary law? But, brave, Thou at first prompting of what I call God, And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend, Accept the obligation laid on thee, Mother elect, to save the unborn child, As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly, Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant And flower o' the field, all in a common pact To worthily defend the trust of trusts, Life from the Ever Living: — didst resist — Anticipate the office that is mine — And with his own sword stay the upraised arm, The endeavour of the wicked, and defend Him who, — again in my default, — was there For visible providence: one less true than thou To touch, i' the past, less practised in the right, Approved less far in all docility To all instruction, — how had such an one Made scruple "Is this motion a decree?""

"The curious crime, the fine Felicity and flower of wickedness."

"Why comes temptation, but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?"

"White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life's business being just the terrible choice."

"Inscribe all human effort with one word, Artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!"

"It is the glory and good of Art That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth,—to mouths like mine, at least."

"Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) Linking our England to his Italy."

"The sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea."

"And I have written three books on the soul, Proving absurd all written hitherto, And putting us to ignorance again."

"Just my vengeance complete, The man sprang to his feet, Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed! So, I was afraid!"

"Oh never star Was lost here but it rose afar."

"When the liquor's out, why clink the cannikin?"

"The sin I impute to each frustrute ghost Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a vice, I say."

"Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years."

"Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat."

"We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire."

"They are perfect; how else?—they shall never change: We are faulty; why not?—we have time in store."

"What's come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth we shall practise in heaven; Works done least rapidly Art most cherishes."

"O woman-country! wooed not wed, Loved all the more by earth's male-lands, Laid to their hearts instead."

"That great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it."

"If two lives join, there is oft a scar. They are one and one, with a shadowy third; One near one is too far."

"Only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn."

"Round and round, like a dance of snow In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go Floating the women faded for ages, Sculptured in stone on the poet's pages."

"How he lies in his rights of a man! Death has done all death can. And absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change."

"Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you, And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems, and new!"

"He who did well in war just earns the right To begin doing well in peace."

"And inasmuch as feeling, the East's gift, Is quick and transient,—comes, and lo! is gone, While Northern thought is slow and durable."

"A people is but the attempt of many To rise to the completer life of one; And those who live as models for the mass Are singly of more value than they all."

"Was there nought better than to enjoy? No feat which, done, would make time break, And let us pent-up creatures through Into eternity, our due? No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?"

"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round."

"Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"

"What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me."

"How sad and bad and mad it was! But then, how it was sweet!"

"So may a glory from defect arise."

"This could but have happened once,— And we missed it, lost it forever."

"Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face. . . . . . . . No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers, The heroes of old; Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears"

"It's wiser being good than bad; It's safer being meek than fierce; It's fitter being sane than mad. My own hope is, a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; That after Last returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched; That what began best can't end worst, Nor what God blessed once prove accurst."

"But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?"

"Better have failed in the high aim, as I, Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed,— As, God be thanked! I do not."

""With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart" once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

"God's justice, tardy though it prove perchance, Rests never on the track until it reach"

"Good, to forgive; Best, to forget! Living, we fret; Dying, we live."

"Can we love but on condition that the thing we love must die?"

"Sky—what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star!"

"Wanting is—what? Summer redundant, Blueness abundant, Where is the blot?"

"But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty."

"There is no truer truth obtainable By Man than comes of music."

"Love is energy of life."

"Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top."

"Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked."

"He concentrated on the special souls of men; seeking God in a series of personal interviews."

"He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away: he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and metaphysics: like the Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis. He may be said to have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried to climb there with a rope ladder."

"If Browning were less difficult to read, he would surely be the dominant poet in this century. I feel the ecstasy with which he exclaims, “Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth this autumn morning!" And how he sets my brain going when he says, because there is imperfection, there must be perfection; completeness must come of incompleteness; failure is an evidence of triumph for the fulness of the days. Yes, discord is, that harmony may be; pain destroys, that health may renew; perhaps I am deaf and blind that others likewise afflicted may see and hear with a more perfect sense! From Browning I learn that there is no lost good, and that makes it easier for me to go at life, right or wrong, do the best I know, and fear not. My heart responds proudly to his exhortation to pay gladly life's debt of pain, darkness and cold. Lift up your burden, it is God's gift, bear it nobly."

"Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas"

"The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypothesis for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments."

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants."

"I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy."

"Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting the Sun as its center & depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of the distance from the center."

"1. Fidelity & Allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves, and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those Oaths. 2. When, therefore, the obligation by the law to fidelity and allegiance ceases, that by the Oath also ceases..."

"It seems to me, that if the matter of our sun and planets and all the matter of the universe, were evenly scattered throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity towards all the rest, and the whole of space throughout which this matter was scattered was but finite, the matter on [toward] the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend towards all the matter on the inside, and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass. But if the matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered at great distances from one another throughout all that infinite space."

"When I wrote my treatise about our System, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose. But if I have done the public any service this way, 'tis due to nothing but industry and a patient thought."

"It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left open to the consideration of my readers."

"I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light."

"In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximating Series and the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into such a series. The same year in May I found the method of tangents of Gregory and Slusius, and in November had the direct method of Fluxions, and the next year in January had the Theory of Colours, and in May following I had entrance into the inverse method of Fluxions. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and having found out how to estimate the force with which [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler's Rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their orbs I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since. What Mr Hugens has published since about centrifugal forces I suppose he had before me. At length in the winter between the years 1676 and 1677 I found the Proposition that by a centrifugal force reciprocally as the square of the distance a Planet must revolve in an Ellipsis about the center of the force placed in the lower umbilicus of the Ellipsis and with a radius drawn to that center describe areas proportional to the times. And in the winter between the years 1683 and 1684 this Proposition with the Demonstration was entered in the Register book of the R. Society. And this is the first instance upon record of any Proposition in the higher Geometry found out by the method in dispute. In the year 1689 Mr Leibnitz, endeavouring to rival me, published a Demonstration of the same Proposition upon another supposition, but his Demonstration proved erroneous for want of skill in the method."

"I have studied these things — you have not."

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

"In default of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God."

"We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. I find more sure remarks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatever."

"Oh, Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!"

"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

"God created everything by number, weight and measure."

"Whence are you certain that ye Ancient of Days is Christ? Does Christ anywhere sit upon ye Throne?"

"Who is a liar, saith John, but he that denyeth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist that denyeth the Father & the Son. And we are authorized also to call him God: for the name of God is in him. Exod. 23.21. And we must believe also that by his incarnation of the Virgin he came in the flesh not in appearance only but really & truly , being in all things made like unto his brethren (Heb. 2 17) for which reason he is called also the son of man."

"I have that honour for him as to believe that he wrote good sense; and therefore take that sense to be his which is the best."

"Were I to assume an hypothesis, it should be this, if propounded more generally, so as not to assume what light is further than that it is something or other capable of exciting vibrations of the ether. First, it is to be assumed that there is an ethereal medium, much of the same constitution as air, but far rarer, subtiller, and more strongly elastic. ...In the second place, it is to be supposed that the ether is a vibrating medium, like air, only the vibrations much more swift and minute; those of air made by a man's ordinary voice succeeding at more than half a foot or a foot distance, but those of ether at a less distance than the hundredth-thousandth part of an inch. And as in air the vibrations are some larger than others, but yet all equally swift... so I suppose the ethereal vibrations differ in bigness but not in swiftness. ...In the fourth place, therefore, I suppose that light is neither ether nor its vibrating motion, but something of a different kind propagated from lucid bodies. They that will may suppose it an aggregate of various peripatetic qualities. Others may suppose it multitudes of unimaginable small and swift corpuscles of various sizes springing from shining bodies at great distances one after the other, but yet without any sensible interval of time. ...To avoid dispute and make this hypothesis general, let every man here take his fancy; only whatever light be, I would suppose it consists of successive rays differing from one another in contingent circumstances, as bigness, force, or vigour, like as the sands on the shore... and, further, I would suppose it diverse from the vibrations of the ether. ...Fifthly, it is to be supposed that light and ether mutually act upon one another. ...æthereal vibrations are therefore the best means by which such a subtile agent as light can shake the gross particles of solid bodies to heat them."

"And so, supposing that light impinging on a refracting or reflecting ethereal superficies puts it into a vibrating motion, that physical superficies being by the perpetual applause of rays always kept in a vibrating motion, and the ether therein continually expanded and compressed by turns, if a ray of light impinge on it when it is much compressed, I suppose it is then too dense and stiff to let the ray through, and so reflects it; but the rays that impinge on it at other times, when it is either expanded by the interval between two vibrations or not too much compressed and condensed, go through and are refracted."

"And now to explain colours. I suppose that as bodies excite sounds of various tones and consequently vibrations, in the air of various bignesses, so when rays of light by impinging on the stiff refracting superficies excite vibrations in the ether, these rays excite vibrations of various bignesses... therefore, the ends of the capillamenta of the optic nerve which front or face the retina being such refracting superficies, when the rays impinge on them they must there excite these vibrations, which vibrations (like those of sound in a trumpet) will run along the pores or crystalline pith of the capillamenta through the optic nerves into the sensorium (which light itself cannot do), and there, I suppose, affect the sense with various colours, according to their bigness and mixture—the biggest with the strongest colours, reds and yellows; the least with the weakest, blues and violets; middle with green; and a confusion of all with white, much after the manner, that in the sense of hearing, nature makes use of aereal vibrations of several bignesses to generate sounds of divers tones; for the analogy of nature is to be observed."

"One [method] is by a Watch to keep time exactly. But, by reason of the motion of the Ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made."

"A good watch may serve to keep a recconing at Sea for some days and to know the time of a Celestial Observ[at]ion: and for this end a good Jewel watch may suffice till a better sort of Watch can be found out. But when the Longitude at sea is once lost, it cannot be found again by any watch."

"Whereas in Arithmetick Questions are only resolv'd by proceeding from given Quantities to the Quantities sought, Algebra proceeds in a retrograde Order, from the Quantities sought as if they were given, to the Quantities given as if they were sought, to the End that we may some Way or other come to a Conclusion or Æquation, from which one may bring out the Quantity sought. And after this Way the most difficult problems are resolv'd, the Resolutions whereof would be sought in vain from only common Arithmetick. Yet Arithmetick in all its Operations is so subservient to Algebra, as that they seem both but to make one perfect Science of Computing; and therefore I will explain them both together."

"After the same Manner in Geometry, if a Line drawn any certain Way be reckon'd for Affirmative, then a Line drawn the contrary Way may be taken for Negative: As if AB be drawn to the right, and BC to the left; and AB be reckon'd Affirmative, then BC will be Negative; because in the drawing it diminishes AB..."

"The Antients, as we learn from Pappus, in vain endeavour'd at the Trisection of an Angle, and the finding out of two mean Proportionals by a right line and a Circle. Afterwards they began to consider the Properties of several other Lines. as the Conchoid, the Cissoid, and the Conick Sections, and by some of these to solve these Problems. At length, having more throughly examin'd the Matter, and the Conick Sections being receiv'd into Geometry, they distinguish'd Problems into three Kinds: viz. (1.) Into Plane ones, which deriving their Original from Lines on a Plane, may be solv'd by a right Line and a Circle; (2.) Into Solid ones, which were solved by Lines deriving their Original from the Consideration of a Solid, that is, of a Cone; (3.) And Linear ones, to the Solution of which were requir'd Lines more compounded. And according to this Distinction, we are not to solve solid Problems by other Lines than the Conick Sections; especially if no other Lines but right ones, a Circle, and the Conick Sections, must be receiv'd into Geometry. But the Moderns advancing yet much farther, have receiv'd into Geometry all Lines that can be express'd by Æquations, and have distinguish'd, according to the Dimensions of the Æquations, those Lines into Kinds; and have made it a Law, that you are not to construct a Problem by a Line of a superior Kind, that may be constructed by one of an inferior one. In the Contemplation of Lines, and finding out their Properties, I like their Distinction of them into Kinds, according to the Dimensions thy Æquations by which they are defin'd. But it is not the Æquation, but the Description that makes the Curve to be a Geometrical one."

"The Circle is a Geometrical Line, not because it may be express'd by an Æquation, but because its Description is a Postulate. It is not the Simplicity of the Æquation, but the Easiness of the Description, which is to determine the Choice of our Lines for the Construction of Problems. For the Æquation that expresses a Parabola, is more simple than That that expresses a Circle, and yet the Circle, by reason of its more simple Construction, is admitted before it. The Circle and the Conick Sections, if you regard the Dimension of the Æquations, are of the fame Order, and yet the Circle is not number'd with them in the Construction of Problems, but by reason of its simple Description, is depressed to a lower Order, viz. that of a right Line; so that it is not improper to express that by a Circle that may be expressed by a right Line. But it is a Fault to construct that by the Conick Sections which may be constructed by a Circle. Either therefore you must take your Law and Rule from the Dimensions of Æquations as observ'd in a Circle, and so take away the Distinction between Plane and Solid Problems; or else you must grant, that that Law is not so strictly to be observ'd in Lines of superior Kinds, but that some, by reason of their more simple Description, may be preferr'd to others of the same Order, and may be number'd with Lines of inferior Orders in the Construction of Problems."

"In Constructions that are equally Geometrical, the most simple are always to be preferr'd. This Law is so universal as to be without Exception. But Algebraick Expressions add nothing to the Simplicity of the Construction; the bare Descriptions of the Lines only are here to be consider'd and these alone were consider'd by those Geometricians who joyn'd a Circle with a right Line. And as these are easy or hard, the Construction becomes easy or hard: And therefore it is foreign to the Nature of the Thing, from any Thing else to establish Laws about Constructions. Either therefore let us, with the Antients, exclude all Lines besides the Circle, and perhaps the Conick Sections, out of Geometry, or admit all, according to the Simplicity of the Description. If the Trochoid were admitted into Geometry, we might, by its Means, divide an Angle in any given Ratio. Would you therefore blame those who should make Use of this Line... and contend that this Line was not defin'd by an Æquition, but that you must make use of such Lines as are defin'd by Æquations?"

"Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation. Therefore these two Sciences ought not to be confounded. The Antients did so industriously distinguish them from one another, that they never introduc'd Arithmetical Terms into Geometry. And the Moderns, by confounding both, have lost the Simplicity in which all the Elegancy of Geometry consists. Wherefore that is Arithmetically more simple which is determin'd by the more simple Æquations, but that is Geometrically more simple which is determin'd by the more simple drawing of Lines; and in Geometry, that ought to be reckon'd best which is Geometrically most simple. Wherefore, I ought not to be blamed, if with that Prince of Mathematicians, Archimedes and other Antients, I make use of the Conchoid for the Construction of solid Problems."

"Geometrical Speculations have just as much Elegancy as Simplicity, and deserve just so much praise as they can promise Use."

"Useful Things, though Mechanical, are justly preferable to useless Speculations in Geometry, as we learn from Pappus."

"In my Judgment no Lines ought to be admitted into plain Geometry besides the right Line and the Circle."

"The Ellipse is the most simple of the Conic Sections, most known, and nearest of Kin to a Circle, and easiest describ'd by the Hand in plano. Though many prefer the Parabola before it, for the Simplicity of the Æquation by which it is express'd. But by this Reason the Parabola ought to be preferr'd before the Circle it self, which it never is. Therefore the reasoning from the Simplicity of the Æquation will not hold. The modern Geometers are too fond of the Speculation of Æquations."

"The Simplicity of Figures depend upon the Simplicity of their Genesis and Ideas, and an Æquation is nothing else than a Description (either Geometrical or Mechanical) by which a Figure is generated and rendered more easy to the Conception."

"Through algebra you easily arrive at equations, but always to pass therefrom to the elegant constructions and demonstrations which usually result by means of the method of porisms is not so easy, nor is one's ingenuity and power of invention so greatly exercised and refined in this analysis."

"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people."

"If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything."

"Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance."

"Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy."

"Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts."

"Newton and Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study."

"According to Sir Isaac Newton's Calculations, the last Comet that made its Appearance in 1680, imbib'd so much Heat by its Approaches to the Sun, that it would have been two thousand times hotter than red hot Iron, had it been a Globe of that Metal; and that supposing it as big as the Earth, and at the same Distance from the Sun, it would be fifty thousand Years in cooling, before it recovered its natural Temper. In the like manner, if an Englishman considers the great Ferment into which our Political World is thrown at present, and how intensely it is heated in all its Parts, he cannot suppose that it will cool again in less than three hundred Years. In such a Tract of Time it is possible that the Heats of the present Age may be extinguished, and our several Classes of great Men represented under their proper Characters. Some eminent Historian may then probably arise that will not write recentibus odiis (as Tacitus expresses it) with the Passions and Prejudices of a contemporary Author, but make an impartial Distribution of Fame among the Great Men of the present Age."

"The greatest scientist who ever lived was Isaac Newton...[about Principia Mathematica] By all odds it's the greatest scientific book ever written or ever will be written, I think."

"Newton's own motto, "hypotheses non fingo" was, in a sense, disregarded by Newton himself: he rejected hypotheses only where they violated his own "regula philosophandi", that is to say, his principle of their strict parsimony. In terms of present-day methodology, we reject hypotheses as scientifically meaningless if they are incapable even of indirect test; and we reject them as superfluous or as implausible if they are too complex and artificial to conform with well established canons of inductive probability. But freedom of scientific theorizing must be preserved wherever the conditions of meaningfulness and of economy appear to be satisfied."

"Kepler succeeded in showing that the planets move along elliptic paths and that the sun lies at a focus of each of these s... Each planet moves so that a straight line drawn to connect it with the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times. ...The discoveries ...enabled Newton to formulate the laws of mechanics in general and those of gravitation in particular. ...He was able to develop Kepler's laws into a comprehensive physical theory only because he managed first to create the necessary mathematical tools... differential and integral calculus, the basic mathematical techniques for dealing with variable quantities, such as the movement of bodies in the course of time. ...[H]e succeeded in drawing from Kepler's empirical laws the principles of motion that applied [to] every instant of time and thus shaped planetary motion into complete orbits."

"Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me ; 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight, And threefold in soft Beulah's night, And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision, & Newton's sleep !"

"No monument should stand over [my] grave, only an apple-tree, in memory of the three apples; the two of Eve and Paris, which made hell out of earth, and that of Newton, which elevated the earth again into the circle of heavenly bodies."

"The landscape has been so totally changed, the ways of thinking have been so deeply affected, that it is very hard to get hold of what it was like before... It is very hard to realize how total a change in outlook he has produced."

"[T]he life and writings of Sir Isaac Newton abound with the richest counsel. Here the philosopher will learn the art by which alone he can acquire an immortal name. The moralist will trace the lineaments of a character adjusted to all the symmetry of which our imperfect nature is susceptible; and the Christian will contemplate with delight the high-priest of science quitting the study of the material universe,—the scene of his intellectual triumphs,—to investigate with humility and patience the mysteries of his faith."

"If Sir Isaac Newton had not been distinguished as a mathematician and a natural philosopher, he would have enjoyed a high reputation as a theologian."

"Newton is known for humbly declaring that he had achieved his great breakthroughs by 'standing on the shoulders of giants.' Though this may be true in part, it is largely humbug. Newton was hardly humble, and it would be just as true to say that he achieved greatness by stamping on the shoulders of giants. When others, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, made breakthroughs in fields he was also researching, Newton fought ferociously to deny them credit for their work."

"There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought. Suppose Newton had founded a Church of Newtonian Physics and refused to show his formula to anyone who doubted the tenets of Newtonian Physics?"

"A student of the history of physical science will assign to Newton a further importance which the average man can hardly appreciate. ...the separation ...of positive scientific inquiries from questions of ultimate causation."

"The history of mathematics and mechanics for a hundred years subsequent to Newton appears primarily as a period devoted to the assimilation of his work and the application of his laws to more varied types of phenomena. So far as objects were masses, moving in space and time under the impress of forces as he had defined them, their behaviour was now, as a result of his labours, fully explicable in terms of exact mathematics."

"When Newton saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation ... A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation'."

"My quotations from Newton suggest the motive which induced him to take a stand against the use of hypotheses, namely, the danger of becoming involved in disagreeable controversies. ...Newton could no more dispense with hypotheses in his own cogitations than an eagle can dispense with flight. Nor did Newton succeed in avoiding controversy."

"Opticks was out of harmony with the ideas of 19th-century physics. ...an exposition of the "wrong" (i.e., corpuscular) theory of light,—even though it also contained many of the basic principles of the "correct" (i.e., wave) theory. Not only had Newton erred in his choice... but also he apparently had found no insuperable difficulty in simultaneously embracing features of two opposing theories. ...by adopting a combination of the two theories at once, he had violated one of the major canons of 19th-century physics... Today our point of view is influenced by the theory of photons and matter waves, or the... complementarity of Neils Bohr; and we may read with a new interest Newtons ideas on the interaction of light and matter or his explanation of the corpuscular and undulatory aspects of light."

"Of the many references to Newton in 18th-century electrical writings only a small number were to the Principia, the greater part by far were to the Opticks. This was true not alone of the electrical writings but also in other fields of experimental enquiry. ...[The Opticks] would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it. ...in the Opticks Newton did not adopt the motto... —Hypotheses non fingo; I frame no hypotheses—but, so to speak, let himself go, allowing his imagination full reign and by far exceeding the bounds of experimental evidence."

"In the year [1666] he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth, but must extend much farther than was usually thought — Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself, & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit. Whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition being absent from the books & taking the common estimate in use among Geographers & our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that to 60 Engish miles were contained in one degree of . His computation did not agree with his Theory and inclined him then to entertain a notion that together with the power of gravity there might be a mixture of that force which the moon would have if it was carried along a vortex, but when the Tract of Picard of the measure of the earth came out shewing that a degree was about 69 1/2 English miles, he began his calculation anew & found it perfectly in agreement to his Theory."

"[Newton] bought a book of Iudicial Astrology out of a curiosity to see what there was in that science & read in it till he came to a figure of the heavens which he could not understand for want of being acquainted with Trigonometry, & to understand the ground of that bought an English Euclid with an Index of all the problems at the end of it & only turned to two or three which he thought necessary for his purpose & read nothing but the titles of them finding them so easy & self evident that he wondered any body would be at the pains of writing a demonstration of them & laid Euclid aside as a trifling book, & was soon convinced of the vanity & emptiness of the pretended science of Iudicial astrology."

"[Newton] achieved the clearest appreciation of the relation between the empirical elements in a scientific system and the hypothetical elements derived from a philosophy of nature."

"Galileo first studied the motion of terrestrial objects, pendulums, free-falling balls, and projectiles. He summarized what he observed in the mathematical language of proportions. And he extrapolated from his experimental data to a great idealization now called the “inertia principle,” which tells us, among other things, that an object projected along an infinite, frictionless plane will continue forever at a constant velocity. His observations were the beginnings of the science of motion we now call “mechanics.”... Newton also invented a mathematical language (the "Fluxions" method, closely related to our present-day ) to express his mechanics, but in an odd historical twist, rarely applied that language himself."

"But to return to the Newtonian Philosophy: Tho' its Truth is supported by Mathematicks, yet its Physical Discoveries may be communicated without. The great Mr. Locke was the first who became a Newtonian Philosopher without the help of Geometry; for having asked Mr. Huygens, whether all the mathematical Propositions in Sir Isaac's Principia were true, and being told he might depend upon their Certainty; he took them for granted, and carefully examined the Reasonings and Corollaries drawn from them, became Master of all the Physics, and was fully convinc'd of the great Discoveries contained in that Book."

"Multiple-prism arrays were first introduced by Newton (1704) in his book Opticks. In that visionary volume Newton reported on arrays of nearly isosceles prisms in additive and compensating configurations to control the propagation path and the dispersion of light. Further, he also illustrated slight beam expansion in a single isosceles prism."

"Newton was at heart a Cartesian, using pure thought as Descartes intended, and using it to demolish the Cartesian dogma of vortices."

"In accordance with Newton's system, physical reality is characterised by concepts of space, time, the material point and force (interaction between material points). Physical events are to be thought of as movements according to law of material points in space. The material point is the only representative of reality in so far as it is subject to change. The concept of the material point is obviously due to observable bodies; one conceived of the material point on the analogy of movable bodies by omitting characteristics of extension, form, spatial locality, and all their 'inner' qualities, retaining only inertia, translation, and the additional concept of force."

"In order to put his system into mathematical form at all, Newton had to devise the concept of differential quotients and propound the laws of motion in the form of total differential equations—perhaps the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make."

"Newton's age has long since passed through the sieve of oblivion, the doubtful striving and suffering of his generation has vanished from our ken; the works of some few great thinkers and artists have remained, to delight and ennoble those who come after us. Newton's discoveries have passed into the stock of accepted knowledge."

"Newton had other postulates by which he could get the law of angular momentum, but Newtonian laws were wrong. There's no forces, it's all a lot of balony. The particles don't have orbits, and so on."

"Newton's proof of the law of refraction is based on an erroneous notion that light travels faster in glass than in air, the same error that Descartes had made. This error stems from the fact that both of them thought that light was corpuscular in nature."

"The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied."

"It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. ...Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. ...There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them."

"Newton's version of gravity violates common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of space? ...Newton's formalism nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny."

"The prejudice for Sir Isaac has been so great, that it has destroyed the intent of his undertaking, and his books have been a means of hindering that knowledge they were intended to promote. It is a notion every child imbibes almost with his mother's milk, that Sir Isaac Newton has carried philosophy to the highest pitch it is capable of being carried, and established a system of physics upon the solid basis of mathematical demonstration."

"Newton said that he made his discoveries by 'intending' his mind on the subject; no doubt truly. But to equal his success one must have the mind which he 'intended.' Forty lesser men might have intended their minds till they cracked, without any like result. It would be idle either to affirm or to deny that the last half-century has produced men of science of the calibre of Newton. It is sufficient that it can show a few capacities of the first rank, competent not only to deal profitably with the inheritance bequeathed by their scientific forefathers, but to pass on to their successors physical truths of a higher order than any yet reached by the human race. And if they have succeeded as Newton succeeded, it is because they have sought truth as he sought it, with no other object than the finding it."

"I esteem his [Newton's] understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of this work, where the author studies things of little use or when he builds on the improbable principle of attraction."

"I do not mind at all that [Newton] is not a Cartesian provided he does not offer us suppositions like that of attraction."

"... Newton was harbouring a terrible secret. He believed that the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity was a diabolical fraud and that all of modern Christianity was tainted by its presence. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not equal in any sense to God the Father, although he was divine, and was worthy of being worshipped in his own right. Newton did not arrive at these beliefs as a result of pursuing some dilettantish hobby; nor were they the result of studies he pursued at the end of his life. Instead, they lay at the heart of a massive research programme on prophecy and that he carried out early in his career. This was at least as strenuous, and, in his eyes, at least as "rational" as his work on physics and mathematics."

"The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them. He paused for some time: “the greatest man,” said he, “that ever lived, was Julius Caesar.” Mr. Adams was honest as a politician, as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men."

"As to the Christian religion, besides the strong evidence which we have for it, there is a balance in its favour from the number of great men who have been convinced of its truth after a serious consideration of the question. Grotius was an acute man, a lawyer, a man accustomed to examine evidence, and he was convinced. Grotius was not a recluse, but a man of the world, who certainly had no bias on the side of religion. Sir Isaac Newton set out an infidel, and came to be a very firm believer."

"I can venture to affirm, without meaning to pluck a leaf from the never-fading laurels of our immortal Newton, that the whole of his theology, and part of his philosophy, may be found in the Vedas."

"Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We knew her woof, her texture: she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule of line. Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade."

"John Maddox, the editor of Nature... retired in 1995. In August of that year, Maddox wrote an editorial entitled "Is the Principia Publishable Now?" in which he questioned whether or not Newton would get his ideas published today, given the current practice of peer review. Maddox speculates on what a reviewer would have written on receiving the script... He toys with the idea that Huygens (a contemporary... and opponent of Newton's ideas) would have written caustically about the gravitation ideas of Newton—"by what means, pray, does the author fancy that this magic can be contrived over the great distance between the Sun and Jupiter and without the lapse of time?""

"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. [...] [H]e looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements[...], but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia."

"In vulgar modern terms Newton was profoundly neurotic of a not unfamiliar type, but... a most extreme example. His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic — with profound shrinking from the world, a paralyzing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs, his discoveries, in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world. ...Until the second phase of his life, he was a wrapt, consecrated solitary, pursuing his studies by intense introspection."

"His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. ... I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his head for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for the purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition that was pre-eminently extraordinary."

"Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica abstracted time from events, establishing its tractability to scientific calculation. Conceived as pure, absolute duration, without qualities, it conforms perfectly to its mathematical idealization (as the real number line). Since time is already pure, its reality indistinguishable from its formalization, a pure mathematics of change – the calculus – can be applied to physical reality without obstruction. The calculus can exactly describe things as they occur in themselves, without straying, even infinitesimally, from the rigorous dictates of formal intelligence. In this way natural philosophy becomes modern science."

"Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."

"When Sir A. Fountaine was at Berlin with Leibnitz in 1701, and at supper with the Queen of Prussia, she asked Leibnitz his opinion of Sir Isaac Newton. Leibnitz said that taking mathematicians from the beginning of the world to the time when Sir Isaac lived, what he had done was much the better half; and added that he had consulted all the learned in Europe upon some difficult points without having any satisfaction, and that when he applied to Sir Isaac, he wrote him in answer by the first post, to do so and so, and then he would find it."

"Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find."

"The one book that turned out to be perhaps the most influential in guiding Newton's mathematical and scientific thought was none other than Descartes' La Géométrie. Newton read it in 1664 and re-read it several times until "by degrees he made himself master of the whole." ...Not only did analytic geometry pave the way for Newton's founding of calculus... but Newton's inner scientific spirit was truly set ablaze."

"Newton was really a very valuable man, not onely for his wonderfull skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too and his great knowledge in the scriptures where in I know few his equals."

"Newton has... acted contrary to his expressed intention only to investigate actual facts. No one is competent to predicate things about absolute space and absolute motion; they are pure things of thought, pure mental constructs, that cannot be produced in experience. All our principles of mechanics are... experimental knowledge concerning the relative positions and motions of bodies. ...No one is warranted in extending these principles beyond the boundaries of experience. In fact, such an extension is meaningless, as no one possesses the requisite knowledge to make use of it."

"We shall find it more conducive to scientific progress to recognise, with Newton, the ideas of time and space as distinct, at least in thought, from that of the material system whose relations these ideas serve to co-ordinate."

"It is an observed fact that bodies of equal mass, placed in the same position relative to the earth, are attracted equally towards the earth whatever they are made of; but this is not a doctrine of abstract dynamics founded on axiomatic principles, but a fact discovered by observation, and verified by the careful experiments of Newton on the times of oscillation of hollow wooden balls suspended by strings of the same length, and containing gold, silver, lead, glass, sand, common salt, wood, water, and wheat. ...measuring the length of a pendulum which swings seconds."

"The fact that a magnet draws iron towards it was noticed by the ancients, but no attention was paid to the force with which the iron attracts the magnet. Newton, however, by placing the magnet in one vessel and the iron in another, and floating both vessels in water so as to touch each other, showed experimentally that as neither vessel was able to propel the other along with itself through the water, the attraction of the iron on the magnet must be equal and opposite to that of the magnet on the iron, both being equal to the pressure between the two vessels."

"We cannot... regard Newton's statement as an appeal to experience and observation, but rather as a deduction of the third law of motion from the first."

"At the end of the [19th] century no extension or analogue of the Newtonian gravitation formula has been generally accepted, and it still stands there as almost the only firmly established mathematical relation, expressive of a property of all matter, to which the progress of more than two centuries has added nothing, from which it has taken nothing away."

"Newton had a profound interest in things Jewish. ...Newton owned five of the works of Maimonides... He also possessed Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata (1677)... along with an edition of the first century Jewish philosopher Philo. His writings reveal that he used the Talmud, the learning of which he accessed through Maimonides and other sources in his library."

"Newton's exegesis merged with a prophetic tradition that helped create during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the religious and political climates that paved the way for the resettlement of Jews in Palestine – the longed-for vision of the Restoration. Newton would have approved."

"When I had the honour of his conversation, I endeavoured to learn his thoughts upon mathematical subjects, and something historical concerning his inventions, that I had not been before acquainted with. I found, he had read fewer of the modern mathematicians, than one could have expected; but his own prodigious invention readily supplied him with what he might have an occasion for in the pursuit of any subject he undertook. I have often heard him censure the handling geometrical subjects by algebraic calculations; and his book of Algebra he called by the name of Universal Arithmetic, in opposition to the injudicious title of Geometry, which Des Cartes had given to the treatise, wherein he shews, how the geometer may assist his invention by such kind of computations. He frequently praised , Barrow and Huygens for not being influenced by the false taste, which then began to prevail. He used to commend the laudable attempt of Hugo de Omerique to restore the ancient analysis, and very much esteemed Apollonius's book De sectione rationis for giving us a clearer notion of that analysis than we had before."

"The first thoughts, which gave rise to his Principia, he had, when he retired from Cambridge in 1666 on account of the plague. As he sat alone in a garden, he fell into a speculation on the power of gravity; that as this power is not found sensibly diminished at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can rise, neither at the tops of the loftiest buildings, nor even on the summits of the highest mountains, it appeared to him reasonable to conclude that this power must extend much further than was usually thought: why not as high as the moon? said he to himself."

"There is a traditional story about Newton: as a young student, he began the study of geometry, as was usual in his time, with the reading of the Elements of Euclid. He read the theorems, saw that they were true, and omitted the proofs. He wondered why anybody should take pains to prove things so evident. Many years later, however, he changed his opinion and praised Euclid. The story may be authentic or not ..."

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! — and all was light."

"Sir Isaac Newton, having perhaps the greatest scientific mind of all time, accepted the books of Book of Daniel and Revelation as revelations from God, being very detailed and accurate representations of the history of the world's dominating kingdoms, and prophesying both the first and second coming of Christ. He understood that the scriptures taught that the true Church of Jesus Christ had been lost, and he awaited three separate future events: 1) the restoration of the gospel by an angel, 2) the re-establishment of the true church, and 3) the rise of a new world kingdom led by the Savior himself, which will crush the kingdoms of the world as the stone pulverized the statue to powder. He saw the whole purpose of these revelations is not to satisfy man's curiosity about the future, but to be a testimony of the foreknowledge of God after they are all fulfilled in the last days. He proposed that the revelations can be understood by discovering rules governing their consistent imagery, but only after they have been fulfilled, unless an interpretation is given with the revelation. Truly Newton's genius was remarkable, and we could learn much from his insights and systematic methods."

"Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. But if, when a man publishes discoveries, he, either through design, or through habit, omit the intermediate steps by which he himself arrived at them; it is no wonder that his speculations confound others... [W]here we see him most in the character of an experimental philosopher, as in his optical inquiries... we may easily conceive that many persons, of equal patience and industry... might have done what he did. And were it possible to see in what manner he was first led to those speculations, the very steps by which he pursued them, the time that he spent in making experiments, and all the unsuccessful and insignificant ones that he made in the course of them; as our pleasure of one kind would be increased, our admiration would probably decrease. Indeed he himself used candidly to acknowledge, that if he had done more than other men, it was owing rather to a habit of patient thinking, than to any thing else. ...[T]he interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder, with which several first rate philosophers are considered; and... an opinion of the greater equality of mankind, in point of genius, and powers of understanding, would be of real service in the present age."

"Dr. Pemberton tells us a that the first thoughts, which gave rise to Newton's Principia, occurred to him when he had retired from Cambridge into Lincolnshire, in 1666, on account of the plague. Voltaire had his information from Mrs. Catharine Barton, Newton's favourite niece, who married Conduitt, a member of the Royal Society, and one of his intimate friends: from having spent a great portion of her life in his society, she was good authority for such an anecdote, and she related that some fruit, falling from a tree, was the accidental cause of this direction to Newton's speculations."

"Un genio es alguien que descubre que la piedra que cae y la luna que no cae representan un solo y mismo fenómeno."

"Newton proposed that the particles of the air (we would call them molecules), were motionless in space and were held apart by repulsive forces between them... He assumed that the repulsive force was inversely proportional to the distance between the particles...He showed that, on the basis of this assumption, a collection of static particles in a box would behave exactly as Boyle had found. His model led directly to Boyle's law. Probably the greatest scientist ever, Newton managed to get the right answer from a model that was wrong in every possible way."

"The weight of a smallish apple is, pleasingly, about 1 newton, or 1 N. ...Newton probably weighed about 700 newtons."

"The view of space that exists independent of any relationship is called the absolute view. It was Newton's view, but it has been definitely repudiated by the experiments that have verified Einstein's theory of general relativity. ...There are unfortunately not a few good professional physicists who still think about the world as if space and time had an absolute meaning."

"Despite Newton's belated appreciation of Euclid's geometry, he set it aside as an undergraduate and immediately turned to Descartes' Geometrie, a much more difficult text. Newton read a few pages... and immediately got stuck. ...The second time through, he progressed a page or two further before running into more difficulties. Again, he read it from the beginning, this time getting further still. He continued this process until he mastered Descartes' text. Had Newton mastered Euclid first, Descartes' analytic geometry would have been much easier to understand. Newton later advised others not to make the same mistake. But Descartes had ignited Newton's interest in mathematics, an interest that bordered on obsession."

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank tea under the shade of some apple trees; only he & myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to him self; occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. "Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. The sum of the drawing power in the matter must be in the earth's center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or toward the center. If matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion to its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.""

"By analyzing the measurements of , Johannes Kepler established that planetary motions weren't circles but ellipses... Through his telescopes, Galileo saw that the Sun had its perfection tarnished by ugly black spots. And the Moon wasn't a perfect sphere but looked like a place, complete with mountains and giant craters. So why didn't it fall down? Isaac Newton finally answered... by exploring... [a radical] idea... that heavenly objects obey the same laws as objects here on Earth. ...Newton ...realized that ...the fate of a horizontally fired cannon ball depends on its speed: it crashes to the ground only if its speed is below some magic value. ...[W]ith ever higher speeds, they'll travel farther ...before landing ...until ...they keep their height over the ground ...constant and never land, merely orbiting ...just like the Moon! Since he knew the strength of gravity near the Earth's surface... he was able to calculate the magic speed... 7.9 kilometers per second. Assuming the Moon... was obeying the same laws... he could similarly predict what speed it needed... Moreover, since the Moon took one month to travel around a circle whose circumference Aristarchos had figured out, Newton already knew its speed... Now he made a remarkable discovery: if he assumed that the force of gravity weakened like the inverse square... then this magical speed that would give the Moon a circular orbit exactly matched its measured speed! He had discovered the law of gravity... applying not merely here on Earth, but in the heavens as well. ...People boldly extrapolated not only to the macrocosmos... but also to the microcosmos, finding that many properties... could be explained by applying to... atoms... The scientific revolution had begun."

"Newton did not show the cause of the apple falling, but he shewed a similitude between the apple and the stars. By doing so he turned old facts into new knowledge; and was well content if he could bring diverse phenomenon under "two or three Principles of Motion" even "though the Causes of these Principles were not yet discovered.""

"The mechanical philosophy is a case of being victimized by metaphor. I choose Descartes and Newton as excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanism malgré eux, that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy."

"When he [Newton] uttered his Hypotheses non fingo he was saying in a very abbreviated, and hence cryptic way: In induction, I do not invent hypotheses, and in deduction I do not demonstrate from them. More fully, he meant that the inductive side of scientific method has a beginning, a middle, and an end and all must be complete before any deductive system is set up. The beginning consists in '"hinting several things" or making "conjectures" about the causes of phenomena...because they are "plausible consequences" drawn from the facts...they are not derived, like Descartes' conclusions, merely by the Light of Reason or intuition. Although hypothetical in character, Newton did not call them "hypotheses". The middle consists of examining these "hints" and improving them by observations and the tests of experiment. The end is defined by his remark: "and if no exception occur from phenomena, the conclusion may be pronounced generally" and considered "proved" as a "general law of nature". "Afterwards,", the deduction proceeds by assuming the conclusions established as principles, and from them demonstrating the phenomena...The peculiar character of this method, the stress upon experience and the rejection of hypotheses of the Cartesian kind, may be briefly described in Berkeley's words: "It is one thing to arrive at general laws of nature from a contemplation of of the phenomena, and another to frame an hypothesis, and from thence deduce the phenomena (S, 229)."

"The reader will recollect that we are here speaking of the Principia as a mechanical treatise only... As a work on dynamics, its merit is, that it contains a wonderful store of refined and beautiful mathematical artifices, applied to solve all the most general problems which the subject offered. It can hardly be said to contain any new inductive discovery respecting the principles of mechanics; for though Newton's "Axioms or Laws of Motion," which stand at the beginning of the book, are a much clearer and more general statement of the grounds of mechanics than had yet appeared, it can hardly be said that they contain any doctrines which had not been previously stated or taken for granted by other mathematicians."

"Such, then, is the great Newtonian induction of universal gravitation, and such its history. It is indisputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever made, whether we look at the advance which it involved, the extent of the truth disclosed, or the fundamental and satisfactory nature of this truth."

"Due to the genius and labours of Newton almost all the problems presented by the motions of the planets had been mastered. Newton had shown for all time that these motions could be completely accounted for if it were assumed that the same laws of nature, and in particular gravity, operated in the celestial realm as well as in the terrestrial. Although the old Aristotelian distinction between the corrupt earth and the incorruptible heavens was thus finally abandoned, the stellar realm still lay beyond the range of scientific investigation. The natural step, taken by Digges and Bruno, of likening the stars to the sun and scattering them throughout space was still only a step of the imagination."

"During the Middle Ages the universe was regarded as finite, with the earth at its centre. The idea was abandoned during the Scientific Renaissance, and the universe came to be pictured as an indefinitely large number of stars scattered throughout infinite Euclidean space. This conception appeared to be a necessary consequence of the theory of gravitation; for, as Newton pointed out, a finite material universe in infinite space would tend to concentrate in one massive lump."

"It is one of the most intriguing facts in the history of science that the two most influential theories concerning the stars—Newton's theory of gravitation and Eddington's theory of stellar construction—were each developed so successfully although Newton was ignorant of the origin of gravitation and Eddington of the origin of stellar energy."

"He was unhappy with the relativity of motion, even though it is a consequence of his equations, and to escape it he postulated the existence of "absolute" space, with respect to which true rest and motion are defined."

"And from my pillow, looking forth by light Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton, with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."

"Here lies Isaac Newton, Knight, Who, by a Vigour of Mind almost supernatural, First demonstrated The Motions and Figures of the Planets, The Paths of the Comets, and the Tides of the Ocean. He diligently investigated The different Refrangibilities of the Rays of Light, And the Properties of the Colours to which they give rise. An assiduous, sagacious, and faithful Interpreter Of Nature, Antiquity, and the Holy Scriptures, He asserted his Philosophy of the Majesty of God, And exhibited in his conduct the Simplicity of the Gospel. Let mortals rejoice That there has existed such and so great An Ornament of Human Nature."

"How does the world recognizes England, the United Kingdom, as the country that gave birth to the modern age? It was not Newton but Galilei who opened the Moderna age."

"I cannot but look upon the strange Instinct of this noisome and troublesome Creature a Louse, of searching out foul and nasty Clothes to harbor and breed in, as an Effect of divine Providence, design'd to deter Men and Women from Sluttishness and Sordidness."

"The use of plants is all our life long of that universal importance and concern that we can neither live nor subsist with any decency and convenience, or be said, indeed, to live at all without them. Whatsoever food is necessary to sustain us, whatsoever conteibutes to delight and refresh us, is supplied and brought forth out of that plentiful and abundant store. And ah! how much more innocent, sweet, and healthful is a table covered with those than with all the reeking flesh of butchered and slaughtered animals. Certainly man by nature was never made to be a carnivorous animal, nor is he armed at all for prey and rapine, with jagged and pointed teeth and crooked claws sharpened to rend and tear, but with gentle hands to gather fruit and vegetables, and with teeth to chew and eat them."

"In a calm sea every man is a pilot."

"Like blood, like good, and like agen make the happiest marriage."

"He speaks Bear-garden. That is, such rude and uncivil, or sordid and dirty language, as the rabble that frequent those sports, are wont to use."

"Money and friendship bribe justice. Beauty is potent, but money is omnipotent."

"Prate us but prade; it's money buys land Money begets money."

"If wishes were butter-cakes, beggars might bite. If wishes were thrushes, beggars would eat birds. If wishes would bide, beggars would ride."

"As full as a piper's bag; as a tick."

"I do not know who first emphasized the need for a clear understanding of the sense in which the term species is to be applied. In the second half of the seventeenth century Ray shows some degree of concern on this matter. In the introduction to the Historia Plantarum, 1686, he discusses some of the difficulties and lays down the principle that varieties which can be produced from the seed of the same plant are to be regarded as belonging to one species, being, I believe, the first to suggest this definition."

"… I am not, and never have been, a Soviet agent."

"For Rothschild... the Avenue Marigny house was a home from home, but... I felt, a prison. Installed there, he was the the de facto if not the de jure head of the family. ...[H]is disposition was a curious, uneasy mixture of arrogance and diffidence. Somewhere between Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between the Old and the New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, he had lost his way, and been floundering about ever since. Embedded deep down in him there was something touching and vulnerable and perceptive; at times lovable even. But so overlaid with the bogus certainties of science, and the equally bogus respect, accorded and expected, on account of his wealth and famous name, that it was only rarely apparent. Once when I was going to London he asked me to take over a case of brandy addressed in large letters to him at his English address. In the guard's van where it was put, among the porters who carried it, wherever it was seen or handled, it aroused an attitude of adoration, real or facetious, as though it had been some holy relic—the bones of a saint or a fragment of the True Cross. Even I partook of its glory, momentarily deputising for this Socialist millionaire, this Rabbinical sceptic, this epicurean ascetic, this Wise Man who had followed the wrong star and found his way to the wrong manger—one complete with chef, central heating and a lift. I think of him in the Avenue Marigny dictating innumerable memoranda, as though in the hope that, if only he dictated enough of them, one would say something; on a basis of the philosophical notion that three monkeys tapping away at typewriters must infallibly, if they keep at it long enough, ultimately tap out the Bible. Rothschild, anyway, did not lack for monkeys. After the war I caught glimpses of him at Cambridge, in think-tanks, once in the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv, still dictating memoranda."

"Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self, more really us than I. And if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is. That you are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that furthermore, this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. And that vast thing that you see far off, far off, far off with telescopes, and you look and look and look, one day you are going to wake up and say, why, that's me! And in knowing that, know, you see, that you never die. That you are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown, and so it goes forever and ever and ever."

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."

"I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek."

"For several years I have referred to this, hitherto, rare and inaccessible work as the I-told-you-so-book, because it has often been implied that I have invented my explanations of Buddhism out of thin air, thus falsifying its authentic teachings... Yet, despite the occultist flavor of its title, The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects is the most direct, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth explanation of Mahayana Buddhism which has thus far been written."

"It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness."

"But what we've got going wrong is we've got a kind of bifurcation [in cultural development]: You take your classified telephone directory, and open up "Churches", and have a ruler in your hand. And you will find that the longest space is occupied by authoritarian, Bible-banging churches. And these people are barbarians, who take the written word of the Bible literally. Because they need terribly, they have a personal need, for something to depend on. ... The government realizes that there is a very large number of people like that; and therefore, to keep their votes, they have to pander to those kind of people. And these are the boys who never grew up; they always need Papa. ... The trouble is that the boys who need Papa, are violent. They have the guns. And they are the types of people who like to be soldiers, policemen—tough guys. And therefore they have a great deal of power."

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."

"This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

"Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth"; but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race—I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 2000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise."

"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning—you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr. so-and-so, Ms. so-and-so, Mrs. so-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."

"If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death—or shall I say, death implies life—you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal perogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satcitananda. Which means sat, that which is, chit, that which is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy."

"So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama."

"Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions: The first one is: Who started it? The second is: Are we going to make it? The third is: Where are we going to put it? The fourth is: Who's going to clean up? And the fifth: Is it serious?"

"I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy."

"Religion is always falling apart."

"There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder."

"Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism."

"I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities."

"Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it."

"The pity of all this is, you know, a man like that Sri Ramakrishna] has to have disciples, or no one would ever hear about him. But somehow, as the generations pass, the flame dies out. And eventually the disciples kill him. I wish that there was a way of putting a time-bomb into scriptures and records — not a time-bomb, but some kind of invisible ink, so that all scriptures would un-print themselves about fifty years after the master's death. And just dissolve."

"Nowadays, of course, progressive theologians are all for sex; they say it's a good thing, the biblical position was not that sex was evil, but that it was good, and that it's alright. But now, look here, what is the real point here? The proof of the pudding is in the eating. What can you get kicked out of the church for? Any church — Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, and the synagogue I think too. What's the real thing for which people get kicked out, excommunicated? For "envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"? "Pride, vainglory, and hardness of heart"? Owning shares in munitions factories? Profiting off slums? No sir. You can be a bishop and live in all those sins openly. But if you go to bed with the wrong person, you're out. So one has to conclude that, for all practical purposes, the church is a sexual regulation society; and it really isn't interested in anything else. Christianity is more preoccupied with sex than even Priapism or Tantric Yoga [are]. Because that's the thing that counts, that's the sin, the really important sin."

"Doctors try to get rid of their patients — clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church."

"The basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things; that is to say separate things, separate events. That is only a way of talking. What do you mean by a thing? A thing is a noun. A noun isn't a part of nature it's a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either."

"This is what troubles me about what we'll call vaguely "the new youth". There's a certain sloppiness. For example, at Millbrook in New York—that place is a mess, it's an unspeakable mess! Everything is dilapidated, it's a pad, not just a pad, but a mattress with the stuffing coming out of it. And this bothers me—because, after all, in America, it's bad enough anyway, we don't revere material, we mistreat it terribly. Los Angeles is the most amazing mistreatment of material that one can see in centuries. This is not a materialistic civilization at all. It is a civilization devoted to the hatred and destruction of material, its conversion into junk and poison gas. And therefore, one of the most sacred missions to be imposed upon those who would be liberated from this culture is that they shall love material, that they shall love color, that they shall dress beautifully, that they shall cook well, that they shall live in lovely houses, and that they shall preserve the face of nature. And this is the cardinal thing in your tradition, my friend, because when the Lord God created the material world, he surprised himself. And having already created it, he sat back, and saw then, that it was good. Very good."

"Now I'm sure that most of you know the old story about the astronaut, who went far out into space, and was asked on his return whether he'd been to heaven and seen God. And he said: "Yes". And so they said to him: "Well, what about God?" And he said: "She's Black"."

"The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love."

"The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing."

"It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity."

"Running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain; trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought."

"There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love."

"“To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.”"

"It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or "human-heartedness" (jen) was always felt to be superior to "righteousness" (i), since man himself is greater than any idea which he may invent. There are times when men's passions are much more trustworthy than their principles."

"If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea."

"If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. ... The main resemblance between these Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people."

"Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or “loyal opposition” to the culture in which it is involved."

"The psychotherapist ... tries to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unnecessary offense to his community, to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world."

"Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning — hatred being a form of bondage to its object."

"Psychotherapists ... are dealing with people whose distress arises from what may be termed maya, to use the Hindu-Buddhist word whose exact meaning is not merely 'illusion' but the entire world-conception of a culture, considered as illusion in the strict etymological sense of a play (Latin, ludere). The aim of a way of liberation is not the destruction of maya but seeing it for what it is, or seeing through it. Play is not to be taken seriously, or, in other words, ideas of the world and of oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be confused with reality."

"When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication."

"If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen."

"Our trouble is that we have ignored and thus feel insecure in the enormous spectrum of love which lies between rather formal friendship and genital sexuality, and thus are always afraid that once we overstep the bounds of formal friendship we must slide inevitably to the extreme of sexual promiscuity."

"How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god."

"The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East — in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe"

"Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time."

"We define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" consciousness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom"—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound."

"Man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organism, or of an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others. Once upon a time the mouth, the hands, and the feet said to each other, "We do all this work gathering food and chewing it up, but that lazy fellow, the stomach, does nothing. It's high time he did some work too, so let's go on strike!" Whereupon they went many days without working, but soon found themselves feeling weaker and weaker until at last each of them realized that the stomach was their stomach, and that they would have to go back to work to remain alive. But even in physiological textbooks, we speak of the brain, or the nervous system, as "governing" the heart or the digestive tract, smuggling bad politics into science, as if the heart belonged to the brain rather than the brain to the heart or the stomach. Yet it is as true, or false, to say that the brain feeds itself" through the stomach as that the stomach "evolves" a brain at its upper entrance to get more food."

"Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do."

"What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is."

"Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music—the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words—all evoking and playing upon each other."

"You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use—which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing—for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound."

"So, too, in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning "play" and the second having the complex sense of illusion (from the Latin ludere, to play), magic, creative power, art, and measuring—as when one dances or draws a design to a certain measure. From this point of view the universe in general and playing in particular are, in a special sense, "meaningless": that is, they do not—like words and symbols—signify or point to something beyond themselves, just as a Mozart sonata conveys no moral or social message and does not try to suggest the natural sounds of wind, thunder, or birdsong."

"The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat. The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once."

"Wouldn't it be as farfetched to call birth the cause of death as to call the cat's head the cause of the tail? Lifting the neck of a bottle implies lifting the bottom as well, for the "two parts" come up at the same time. If I pick up an accordion by one end, the other will follow a little later, but the principle is the same. Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space."

"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black."

"Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about it than adults."

"There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion."

"Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons."

"The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure — like the Pasteur serum for rabies."

"In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and abominate Negroes, communists, Russians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, beatniks, homosexuals, and "dope-fiends." These hatreds are not going to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting those who feel them, and the abusive labels with which we plaster them—squares, fascists, rightists, know-nothings—may well become the proud badges and symbols around which they will rally and consolidate themselves. Nor will it do to confront the opposition in public with polite and nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations, while boosting our collective ego by insulting them in private. If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world—-especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside. For want of this awareness, no one can be more belligerent than a pacifist on the rampage, or more militantly nationalistic than an anti-imperialist."

"The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the [current] spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin."

"If I first see a tree in the winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. But when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, 'Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all.' Imagine, then, that a billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as 'Just a bunch of old rocks!' But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: 'Well - you were peopling rocks after all!' You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong."

"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."

"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever."

"The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere "creatures" who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the "harmony of contained conflicts" in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving "I" as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone."

"We are becoming accustomed to a conception of the universe so mysterious and so impressive that even the best father-image will no longer do for an explanation of what makes it run. But the problem then is that it is impossible for us to conceive an image higher than the human image. Few of us have ever met an angel, and probably would not recognize it if we saw one, and our images of an impersonal or suprapersonal God are hopelessly subhuman—jello, featureless light, homogenized space, or a whopping jolt of electricity. However, our image of man is changing as it becomes clearer and clearer that the human being is notsimply and only his physical organism. My body is also my total environment, and this must be measured by light-years in the billions. Hitherto the poets and philosophers of science have used the vast expanse and duration of the universe as a pretext for reflections on the unimportance of man, forgetting that man with "that enchanted loom, the brain" is precisely what transforms this immense electrical pulsation into light and color, shape and sound, large and small, hard and heavy, long and short. In knowing the world we humanize it, and if, as we discover it, we are astonished at its dimensions and its complexity, we should be just as astonished that we have the brains to perceive it."

"We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think—only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details."

"An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency."

"When you tell a girl how beautiful she is, she will say, "Now isn't that just like a man! All you men think about is bodies. OK, so I'm beautiful, but I got my body from my parents and it was just luck. I prefer to be admired for myself, not my chassis." Poor little chauffeur! All she is saying is that she has lost touch with her own astonishing wisdom and ingenuity, and wants to be admired for some trivial tricks that she can perform with her conscious attention. And we are all in the same situation, having dissociated ourselves from our bodies and from the whole network of forces in which bodies can come to birth and live."

"Furthermore, the younger members of our society have for some time been in growing rebellion against paternal authority and the paternal state. For one reason, the home in an industrial society is chiefly a dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that wife and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character who brings in money, and after working hours he is supposed to forget about his job and have fun. Novels, magazines, television, and popular cartoons therefore portray "Dad" as an incompetent clown. And the image has some truth in it because Dad has fallen for the hoax that work is simply something you do to make money, and with money you can get anything you want. It is no wonder that an increasing proportion of college students want no part in Dad's world, and will do anything to avoid the rat-race of the salesman, commuter, clerk, and corporate executive. Professional men, too—architects, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and professors—have offices away from home, and thus, because the demands of their families boil down more and more to money, are ever more tempted to regard even professional vocations as ways of making money. All this is further aggravated by the fact that parents no longer educate their own children. Thus the child does not grow up with understanding of or enthusiasm for his father's work. Instead, he is sent to an understaffed school run mostly by women which, under the circumstances, can do no more than hand out mass-produced education which prepares the child for everything and nothing. It has no relation whatever to his father's vocation."

"Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics, have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.) The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but."

"Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body."

"This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite—names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectabilitywith the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensorily concrete experience—the "unitive" experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in "naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words."

"One sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies—correlative in the sense that they "gowith" each other and cannot exist apart. This, rather than any miasmic absorption of differences into acontinuum of ultimate goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world. For this unity is not mere one-ness as opposed to multiplicity, since these two terms are themselves polar. The unity, or inseparability, of one and many is therefore referred to in Vedanta philosophy as "nonduality" (advaita) to distinguish it from simple uniformity."

"There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost."

"As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses."

"Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time."

"I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced; but also perverse, although you must remember that this word means per (through) verse (poetry), out-of-the-way and wayward, which is surely towards the way, and that to be queer—to "follow your own weird"—is wholeheartedly to accept your karma, or fate, or destiny, and thus to be odd in the service of God, "whose service," as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer declares, "is perfect freedom.""

"Do you suppose that God takes himself seriously? I know a Zen master, Joshu Sasaki, who has let it be known that the best form of meditation is to stand up with your hands on your hips and roar with laughter for ten minutes every morning. I have heard of a sophisticated shaman-type fellow who used to cure ringworm on cows just by pointing at the scars and laughing. Truly religious people always make jokes about their religion; their faith is so strong that they can afford it. Much of the secret of life consists in knowing how to laugh, and also how to breathe."

"In an autobiography one must surely be allowed to boast, just for fun. I have, at a range of twenty feet, shot the tobacco out of a cigarette and left the paper intact. At a range of thirty feet, I have split a target, edge towards me, with an air pistol. I am also the world's champion in a game called "You Are the Target," in which anyone better than I would be dead. The game is to shoot an arrow straight up and see how near to you it can be allowed to land. You have to watch its fall very carefully, but I have had it hit the ground exactly between my feet. Of course, there were no witnesses. Had there been, they would forcefully have discouraged the experiment. I was using a fifty-five pound bow."

"Speaking as of today, I do not consider it intellectually respectable to be a partisan in matters of religion. I see religion as I see such other basic fascinations as art and science, in which there is room for many different approaches, styles, techniques, and opinions. Thus I am not formally a committed member of any creed or sect and hold no particular religious view or doctrine as absolute. I deplore missionary zeal, and consider excessive dedication to and advocacy of any particular religion, as either the best or the only true way, an almost irreligious arrogance. Yet my work and my life are fully concerned with religion, and the mystery of being is my supreme fascination, though, as a shameless mystic, I am more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory."

"At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs."

"Over the years it has become my firm opinion that sexual activity (even if only through masturbation) is "requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul"; for men and women alike. It stimulates your glands, exercises your pelvis, thrills your nerves, brings mind and body together as one, and culminates in an ecstasy in which there is neither past nor future nor separation between self and other. We need that as we need vitamins, proteins, water, and air."

"Everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life."

"Unbelievably, there is still here [in Los Angeles] one of my most favorite places—the home of Henry and Ruth Denison at the very top of the hill, at the end of a road going nowhere, hanging above a reservoir-lake surrounded with pines. They have a sundeck under a eucalyptus tree where I have slept some memorably deep sleeps, and awakened very early in the morning, before sunrise, with stars still showing through the branches. In this house I have made some of my greatest friendships, so much so that I cannot think of it without that curious pleasure-pain which the Japanese call aware—the sense of echoes in the courtyards of the mind after the sun has left and the people have gone their ways forever."

"We say in popular speech that we come into this world, but we do nothing of the kind. We come out of it. In the same way as the fruit comes out of the tree, the egg from the chicken, and the baby from the womb, we are symptomatic of the universe. Just as in the retina there are myriads of little nerve endings, we are the nerve endings of the universe."

"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion."

"The transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated, as long as we think of it in terms as something that I, my self can bring about. because it leads to endless games of spiritual oneupmanship, and Guru competitions."

"[Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now — and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there. ... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility."

"If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God."

"We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the best place for it."

"The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence."

"Love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity. Everybody has it. Existence is love. But it's like water flowing through a hose. It depends in which direction you point it. So everybody has the force running. And maybe, the way in which you find the force of love operating in you, is that you have a passionate like of booze, or ice cream, or automobiles, or good-looking members of the opposite sex or the same sex, but there is love operating. And people, of course, tend to distinguish between the various kinds of love, there are good kinds, such as divine charity, and allegedly bad kinds, such as, in quotes, animal lust. But it should be understood I think, that they are all forms of the same thing. But they differ, in rather the same way that the colors of white light divide into the spectrum when passed through a prism. So we might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud's libido. And the violet end of the spectrum of love is agape, what is called divine love or divine charity. And that in the middle the various yellows, blues, and greens, are friendship, human endearment, consideration, and all that sort of fellow-feeling. But it's all the same thing."

"Additionally, in the United States, we define manliness in terms of aggression. I think it must be because we're frightened. We put on a show of being tough guys, but it's completely unnecessary, you know. If you have what it takes, you don't need to put on an act, and you certainly don't need to beat nature into submission. Why be hostile to nature?"

"Have you really looked at a seashell? There's not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere - it's absolutely perfect. Now, do you think that shells look at each other and critique each other's appearance? "Well, your markings are a little crooked and not very well spaced." Of course not, but that's what we do. Every one of us is marvellous and complicated and interesting and gorgeous just as we are. Really take a look at another person's eyes. They are jewelry beyond compare - just beautiful!"

"“I realized that the difference that I saw between things was the same thing as their unity, because differences (borders, lines, surfaces, boundaries) don't really divide things from each other at all, they join them together, because all boundaries are held in common”"

"I remember asking Alan why he was teaching. He just smiled at me, and pointed out the window, to a bird flying. There was no reason why he was teaching, he replied. He taught, he said, just as the bird flies."

"Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell as well as Alan Watts' The Joyous Cosmology spoke eloquently of the dimensions the psychedelics open up."

"Our kitchen became a busy intersection of philosophic and scientific traffic. Alan Watts and Jano, his wife, lived in Cambridge that fall and came by evenings. The wizard held court, drinking heavily, spinning out tales about fabled consciousness expanders of the past. Here was the oral tradition of education in action. Alan told stories about the great mystics of history …. [He] didn't talk much about Hindu gurus and swamis. He felt they were humorless, authoritarian. … He gave us a model of the gentleman-philosopher who belonged to no bureaucracy or academic institution. He had published more influential books than any orientalist of our time. Although he could teach rings around any tenured professor, he had avoided faculty status, remaining a wandering independent sage, supporting himself with the immediate fruits of his plentiful brain. He was a full-time all-out philosopher in his words and in his actions. Watts taught us to divide mystics into two groups—the lugubrious and the witty. Ever since then I have remained unenthusiastic about pious teachers who set up schools, hierarchies, and special rituals that mimic organized religions."

"Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion."

"The notion was rapidly spreading that all you have to do to be a mystic is learn a new mental worldview. … You know, we went through all this with Alan Watts. God knows nobody did more for mystical studies, especially Zen, than Alan, and I don't know a single person of my generation interested in transcendence who wasn't touched deeply by the man. Nobody could write like Watts, nobody. But it was just that—words. It was only at the end of his life that he rather surreptitiously began to admit that the core of Zen is, in fact, zazen."

"Alan is often criticized for this and that—too much drinking, or that he was a "mere" popularizer. But give me a break! Yeats said of Oscar Wilde that he left at least half his work in conversation. I say the same thing about Alan. He was a brilliant talker. He took the Bay Area by storm, starting in the early 50s. We had a very liberal NPR radio station and television station, on both of which he became a star. He was as good an extemporaneous conversationalist as I've ever met. Endlessly charming, he could be very amusing. To say he's nothing but a popularizer is an injustice. With DT Suzuki he was the most salient popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the 50s and 60s. Alan was a huge influence on Bay Area culture because he was so insightful, funny and witty. But not sarcastic. He was generous and very playful. His weaknesses were on the side of impulse control, not on the side of cruelty snark. He was fun and he was brilliant. Aesthetics were huge for Alan—he could have been a professor of aesthetics like John Ruskin. He was a great appreciator of beauty—costume, cooking, architecture, Feng Shui, clothes, costumes, poetry."

"Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died."

"Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom."

"I hate being moved. I hate that man who came in. So self-righteous, so cruel. He made fun of me, that's why I cried. You never did that. You led me into temptation by your — politeness."

"Irrespective of nationality, soldiers are always open to the same discomfort and to the same comradeship the world over. I'll make things easy for you if you make things easy for me. That is, after all the unwritten law of the barracks."

"If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue."

"To be gentle, tolerant, wise and reasonable requires a goodly portion of toughness."

"By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door."

"I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer."

"Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth."

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."

"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."

"Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus."

"Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a superabundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares."

"The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us."

"There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners."

"It is unfortunate for all that no moral issue has ever been clearer. Any attempt to plea-bargain with outlaws and renegades will only be at the expense of honor, decency and self-respect. The Serbs, are two-dimensional people with a craving for simplicity and an ideology so basic it can be understood without effort. They need enemies, not friends, to focus their two-dimensional ideas. Life for them is a simple tune, never an orchestration, or even a pleasant harmony. Animals make use of their resources with far greater felicity than these retorted creatures, whose subscription to the human race is well in arrears."

"Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique."

"Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them."

"Sex is a conversation carried out by other means."

"Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

"I have Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Ethiopian blood in my veins."

"The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill."

"Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy."

"Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of."

"The only one who's always punctual is Death … whatever the time he always strikes his knell at the first streak of dawn … and believe me, he knows what he's doing. How I hate the dawn! It's the hour of the firing squad. The last glass of brandy. The ultimate cigarette. The final wish. All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses … fix your bayonets boys …gentlemen, synchronize your watches … in ten seconds time the barrage starts … a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years... And finally dawn is the herald of the day, our twelve hours of unimportance, when we have to cede to the pressures of the powers, smile at people we have every reason but expediency to detest … A diplomat these days is nothing but a head-waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally."

"I'm Rally of Unionist Separist Extremes, sometimes known as the R.U.S.E. … It's the party at present in power."

"2nd Soldier: Do you mean that, as a General, you're not the tiniest bit ambitious for our military future? General: I prefer our military past. The harm's done and there it is. As for being a General, well, at the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords, we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it."

"Good-bye to you too ol' Rights of Man!"

"It's hot. And there's a lot of it. I like everything about it except the flavor."

"Flogging. The only solution to every problem. I warrant even the culprit himself doesn't know! It was just — his turn!"

"It's wrong to flog a man. It's against his being a man."

"The sea is calm you said. Peaceful. Calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who's to tell me it's any different here on board, or yonder on dry land."

"You know Seymour, there are some men who cannot stand too much perfection. They see it as a disease, which must be stamped out at its first rash showing."

"Lieutenant Seymour: Wyatt, we do not deal with justice here, but with the law. Lieutenant Wyatt: Was not the one conceived to serve the other?"

"I'd rather be buried at sea than on the shore when I come to die. Will you stand by the plank, mates, so I can shake a friendly hand before I sink?"

"Claggert: We must serve the law, sir, or give up the right and privilege of service. It is only within that law that we may use our discretions according to our rank. Captain Vere: You're so intelligent and so lucid for the rank you hold, Master At Arms. Claggert: I thank you, sir. Captain Vere: Yes, that's no flattery, Mr. Claggart. It's a melancholy fact. It's sad to see such qualities of mind bent to such a sorry purpose. What's the reason for it? Claggert: I am what I am, sir. And what the world has made me. Captain Vere: The world? The world demands that behind every peacemaker there be the gun, the gallows, the jail. Do you think it will always be so? Claggert: I have no reason not to, sir. Captain Vere: You live without hope? Claggert: I live. Captain Vere: But remember, Mr. Claggart, that even the man who wields the whip cannot defy the code we must obey and not be broken by it. That will be all."

"Billy Budd: You didn't even hate him. I think that sometimes you hate yourself. I was thinking, sir, the nights are lonely. Perhaps I could talk with you between watches when you've nothing else to do. Claggert: Lonely. What do you know of loneliness? Billy Budd: Them's alone that want to be. Claggert: Nights are long. Conversation helps pass the time. Billy Budd: Can I talk to you again, then? It would mean a lot to me. Claggert: Perhaps to me, too. [His expression suddenly sours] Oh, no. You would charm me too, huh? Get away."

"I am just a man, not fit to do the work of God... or the Devil."

"To all those who by accident or design, have not been included in this book."

"I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world."

"Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first."

"Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well."

"Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity."

"I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool, an optimist must know what a sad place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day."

"We have fought two wars to end war. In 1976, the nations of this world set aside the same amount of money for its starving children as the lavished on armaments every two hours. Can any right-minded man afford to be a pessimist? That was a luxury for easier days."

"The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation."

"Basically I'm a very serious person, but I think the form it takes with me is comedy. I see the amusing side of all potentially pompous situations."

"Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much."

"I have four children which is not bad considering I'm not a Catholic."

"It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously."

"To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal."

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit."

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done."

"Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find."

"The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come."

"He had a great sense of the good in people. He enjoyed the peculiarities that were part of humanity. … Filming can be desperately boring and he was always telling fantastic stories and being tremendously entertaining."

"He was a superb raconteur — never vicious, never cruel."

"Sir Peter had a magical way with children and an inimitable way of making their problems matter to people all over the world. He was one of UNICEF’s most effective and beloved partners, a man who exemplified the idea that one person can make a world of difference. … There are few parts of the globe where Sir Peter did not travel to meet with and advocate for children, and few communities that were not made better by his attention."

"I was walking barefoot on St. Paul's bridge When I saw a man talking to God He was round and handsome Anachronistically A little odd I overheard his conversation He said, "I can't live in a world devoid of love." And the voice, the voice was so familiar It was the voice of Peter Ustinov "Peter," I whispered from the shadows "We've all been damaged by the 20th century A man like you can talk to God But can you spare a word for me? For I have loved you since the time I saw you in The Mouse that Roared." "That was Peter Sellers, my dear. Go away," he implored."

"Then he lifted his body up To throw himself to a watery grave "Peter," I yelled "What about Billy Budd The innocent no one could save?""

"It was as if all the world's wit were rolled into one portly fellow. … He spoke six languages, and a few others of his own comic invention. With gifts too wide-ranging to be contained in one art form, he wrote hit plays (Romanoff and Juliet) and books of nonfiction and short stories. … His spirit was essentially impish (as on a comedy album for which he provided all the voices and sound effects); his greatest role was Peter Ustinov, inexhaustible raconteur. The title of his 1977 autobiography summed up the world's opinion of this engaging, capacious talent: Dear Me."

"Sunshine Sally and Peter Ustinov don't like the scene anyhow. I dropped acid on a Saturday night just to see what the fuss was about."

"He was a man for all seasons, perhaps the true renaissance man."

"I quite like talking myself, but when Peter was in the room there wasn't much point, you just had to listen. He was unimaginably, overwhelmingly gifted. You had to imagine a cross between Dr Johnson, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Sellers and don't forget Charlie Chaplin — because Peter was a great mime too. … He was inexhaustible. It was like talking to Europe, talking to history."

"I think he'd just get bored doing one thing. He would go from one thing to another I think because to him it was all one. That's what I loved about him. He was a very lovable man. I hardly knew him, I only met him two or three times, but each time was ingrained in my memory like being like some superb intellectual circus."

"The day had to come when he'd be gone. Thank God it was a long time coming. But he's a big thing to do without."

"He would always see the bright side of something, even something that would be very annoying to him or to all of us around him. He would get over it and he would always find that there was something positive to be gained from it. He was a giver, throughout everything, and a wonderful warm person."

"Jack of all trades, master of none — but what a jack! … In the end he was a disappointed man … He wanted to be a great playwright or a great author. He never quite made that."

"He was one of the great story tellers of modern times. The biggest shame is that we have so few people left these days who really tell stories."

"Peter's most outstanding achievement was to be Peter Ustinov … and he was an all-round wonderful person. I'm very glad to have known him, I shall miss him greatly."

"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings."

"Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself."

"A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine."

"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily."

"This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms."

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."

"The Exclusion Principle is laid down purely for the benefit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted (and become dragons or demons) if allowed to associate too freely."

"Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. To do so would of course meet with great opposition, unless we have advanced greatly in religious toleration from the days of Galileo. There would be great opposition from the intellectuals who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the machines were trying to say, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”."

"The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. ...According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine. ...I show that certain large classes of numbers are computable. They include, for instance, the real parts of all s, the real parts of the zeros of the Bessel functions, the numbers π, e, etc. The computable numbers do not, however, include all definable numbers. ...[C]onclusions are reached which are superficially similar to those of Gödel. ...[I]t is shown ...that the Hilbertian can have no solution. In a recent paper ... reaches similar conclusions..."

"We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qK which will be called " m-configurations "."

"The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol"."

"The "scanned symbol" is the only one of which the machine is... "directly aware". However, by altering its m-configuration the machine can effectively remember some of the symbols which it has "seen" (scanned) previously."

"In some of the configurations in which the scanned square is blank... the machine writes down a new symbol on the scanned square: in other configurations it erases the scanned symbol."

"The machine may also change the square which is being scanned, but only by shifting it one place to right or left."

"[T]he m-configuration may be changed."

"Some of the symbols written down will form the sequence of figures which is the decimal of the real number... being computed. The others are just rough notes to "assist the memory ". ...[O]nly ...these rough notes ...will be liable to erasure."

"[T]hese operations include all those which are used in the computation..."

"For some purposes we might use machines (choice... or c-machines) whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration... When such a machine reaches... ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary choice has been made by an external operator. This would be the case if we were using machines to deal with axiomatic systems."

"In this paper I deal only with automatic machines, and will therefore often omit the prefix ɑ-."

"If an ɑ-machine prints two kinds of symbols, of which the first kind (called figures) consists entirely of 0 and 1 (the others being called symbols of the second kind), then the machine will be called a computing machine."

"It will be useful to put... tables into a... standard form. ...The lines of the table are... of form m-config. | Symbol | Operations | Final m-config. In this way we obtain a complete description of the machine. ...This new description of the machine may be called the standard description (S.D). ...[W]e shall have a description of the machine in the form of an arabic numeral. The integer represented by this numeral may be called a description number (D.N) of the machine. The D.N determine the S.D and the structure of the machine uniquely. The machine whose D.N is n may be described as \mathcal{M}(n)."

"To each computable sequence there corresponds at least one description number, while to no description number does there correspond more than one computable sequence. The computable sequences and numbers are therefore enumerable."

"It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. If this machine \mathcal{U} is supplied with a tape on the beginning of which is written the S.D of some computing machine \mathcal{M}, then \mathcal{U} will compute the same sequence as \mathcal{M}."

"Can machines think?"... The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

"We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant."

"May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?"

"We are not asking whether all digital computers would do well in the game nor whether the computers at present available would do well, but whether there are imaginable computers which would do well."

"The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer."

"A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts: (i) Store. (ii) Executive unit. (iii) Control. ...The executive unit is the part which carries out the various individual operations involved in a calculation. ...It is the duty of the control to see that...[the table of] instructions are obeyed correctly and in the right order. ...A typical instruction might say—"Add the number stored in position 6809 to that in 4302 and put the result back into the latter storage position." Needless to say it would not occur in the machine expressed in English. It would more likely be coded in a form such as 6809430217. Here 17 says which of various possible operations [add] is to be performed on the two numbers. ...It will be noticed that the instruction takes up 10 digits and so forms one packet of information..."

"Suppose Mother wants Tommy to call at the cobbler's every morning on his way to school to see if her shoes are done, she can ask him afresh every morning. Alternatively she can stick up a notice once and for all in the hall which he will see when he leaves for school and which tells him to call for the shoes, and also to destroy the notice when he comes back if he has the shoes with him."

"If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour of the human computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done, and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as "programming.""

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

"I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, "And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day" (Joshua x. 13) and "He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time" (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory."

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."

"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles."

"Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub-critical," i.e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?""

"Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets."

"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."

"It is customary... to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. ... I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set."

"Alan Turing was the first to make a careful analysis of the potential capabilities of machines, inventing his famous "Turing machines" for the purpose. He argued that if any machine could perform a computation, then some Turing machine could perform it. The argument focuses on the assertion that any machine's operations could be simulated, one step at a time, by certain simple operations, and that Turing machines were capable of those simple operations. Turing's first fame resulted from applying this analysis to a problem posed earlier by Hilbert, which concerned the possibility of mechanizing mathematics. Turing showed that in a certain sense, it is impossible to mechanize mathematics: We shall never be able to build an "oracle" machine that can correctly answer all mathematical questions presented to it with a "yes" or "no" answer. In another famous paper Turing went on to consider the somewhat different question, "Can machines think?." It is a different question, because perhaps machines can think, but they might not be any better at mathematics than humans are; or perhaps they might be better at mathematics than humans are, but not by thinking, just by brute-force calculation power. These two papers of Turing lie near the roots of the subjects today known as automated deduction and artificial intelligence."

"I’d keep hearing: 'Oh, Alan Turing? Wasn’t he something to do with Bletchley Park? Didn’t he create the Apple logo? Didn’t he bite an apple?' But not many people know the whole story, that he invented the computer, broke the Enigma code, was prosecuted for being a homosexual and underwent a year of oestrogen injections before dying in 1954. The irony and sickness of it was extraordinary! He wasn’t shouting from the rooftops or trying to start a cause, he was just a man who was gay. He’s such a quiet hero."

"Beyond any doubt, the most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turing’s invention of the notion of mechanical rationality."

"And if the physicists who understood its potential had not told their generals and politicians, these would certainly have remained in ignorance, unless they were themselves postgraduate physicists, which was very unlikely. Again, Alan Turing's celebrated paper of 1935, which was to provide the foundation of modern computer theory, was originally written as a speculative exploration for mathematical logicians. The war gave him and others the occasion to translate theory into the beginnings of practice for the purpose of code-breaking, but when it appeared nobody except a handful of mathematicians even read, let alone took notice of Turing's paper. Even in his own college this clumsy-looking pale-faced genius, then a junior fellow with a taste for jogging, who posthumously became a sort of icon among homosexuals, was not a figure of any prominence; at least I do not remember him as such."

"Actually, with one alleged exception, the links of King’s dons with intelligence were with the British rather than the Soviet secret services. Kingsmen, headed by the small, roly-poly later professor of ancient history, F. E. Adcock, had set up the British codebreaking establishment in the First World War, and at least seventeen King’s dons were recruited by Adcock for the much more famous establishment at Bletchley during the Second World War, including probably the only genius at King’s in my undergraduate years, the mathematical logician Alan Turing, whom I recall as a clumsy-looking, pale-faced young fellow given to what would today be called jogging."

"From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing – among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, ‘it’s a mathematician that you’ve never heard of.’ When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I’d do anything to write this film, I’d write it for free. It was all about luck and passion."

"Here’s the thing. Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look out at all of these disconcertingly attractive faces. I do. And that’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard. So in this brief time here, what I wanted to do was say this: When I was 16-years-old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here — and so I would like this moment to be for this kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere: Yes, you do. I promise you do. Stay weird, stay different — and then, when it’s your turn, and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along."

"I’m not gay, but I don’t think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. … I’m also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless I always identified with him so much."

"His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.""

"He wondered what one might ask in a structured conversation to decide if one's interlocutor was a human being or a computer. ...but the ultimate Turing test might be to pose the question "How would a guilt-stricken homosexual commit suicide?" Would a computer ever conceive of eating an apple laced with cyanide?"

"Although a mathematician, Turing took quite an interest in the engineering side of computer design. There was some discussion in 1947 as to whether a cheaper substance than mercury could not be found for use as an ultrasonic delay medium. Turing's contribution to this discussion was to advocate the use of gin, which he said contained alcohol and water in just the right proportions to give a zero temperature coefficient of propagation velocity at room temperature."

"Turing had a strong predeliction for working things out from first principles, usually in the first instance without consulting any previous work on the subject, and no doubt it was this habit which gave his work that characteristically original flavor. I was reminded of a remark which Beethoven is reputed to have made when he was asked if he had heard a certain work of Mozart which was attracting much attention. He replied that he had not, and added "neither shall I do so, lest I forfeit some of my own originality.""

"He was particularly fond of little programming tricks (some people would say that he was too fond of them to be a "good" programmer) and would chuckle with boyish good humor at any little tricks I may have used."

"There is an imperialism that deserves all honor and respect — an imperialism of service in the discharge of great duties. But with too many it is the sense of domination and aggrandisement, the glorification of power. The price of peace is eternal vigilance."

": These have often been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but also to Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and many others; Lord Denning in The Road to Justice (1988) states that the phrase originated in a statement of Irish orator John Philpot Curran in 1790: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.""

"What a jolly awakening there will be some few years hence, when the inevitable argument of experience will show us a nation contradicting itself through the voices of its chosen representatives! The stupidest politician will sit up, rubbing his eyes. After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, "Lies — damned lies — and statistics," still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of. So we may be led to the serious consideration of change by the evolution of materials of conviction which those who run may read, though some who read may wish to run away from them."

"We may blunder on in spite of repeated miscalculations of the popular will. More penetrating and pernicious is the influence our ill-devised machinery has upon the character of our national life. It eats in and into it. It degrades candidates and electors alike. It does its worst to reduce to sterility of influence many of the best of the component elements of the people. The individuals survive, but with their political activity dead or dying, no opportunities of life and growth being afforded them. Finally it presents as an embodiment of the nation an assembly or assemblies into which none can enter who have not been clipped, and pared, and trimmed, and stretched out of natural shape and likeness to slip along the grooves of supply. A free press, free pulpits, and a free people outside help to correct what would otherwise become intolerable but press, pulpits and people, free as they are, work and live in strict limits of relation to the machinery established among them. The world revolves on its axis subject to the Constitution of the United States, and the most Radical newspaper man in London, if such there be, never lets his imagination range out of hearing of the Clock Tower."

"The young man who is moved in any way to contemplate an entry into public life, whose creed is not in absolute inheritance from his fathers, learns first of all to understand that there are two great political organizations, with one of which he must associate himself, learning and echoing its catch-words, accepting its leadership, and steeping himself in the belief that in it are wisdom and truth while the other party is void of both. It is not everyone whose ductile mind takes him through this training, and a goodly number of up-growing men of not the worst promise for the future have to step aside."

"What an education follows! It is really a fine comedy, though the players rarely know it. I am but a clumsy performer myself, and have to confess to incurable defects of training, so that I sometimes wonder I have not been hissed off the stage; still I have seen the performance through more than once or twice, and know something about it. Such tender and delicate adjustments and readjustments of convictions to keep the party balance sure! Such abundance of spoonmeat on the one hand, and such careful economy on the other of truths that may prove too strong for weak digestions! Such avowals of readiness to consider seriously any opinion, however obviously absurd, broached by a possible supporter! Such prompt denunciations of all the devices of an irreconcilable opponent!"

"As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief? Strong and courageous natures know it, and remain strong and courageous in spite of knowledge and practice; but the pliancy of man is beyond admiration, and is nowhere better seen than under the schooling of Parliament."

"It is true— it has been already admitted— that the picture will not be universally recognized; but it has been suggested that the failure of recognition lies rather in the degeneracy of the faculty of seeing than in the misrepresentation of the vision to be seen. It may be also confessed that life often survives all the perversities of training. We cannot absolutely nullify the prodigality of nature, try as hard as we may. In spite of most careful management, untractable growths survive in the most provoking way, and intrude themselves into fields believed to be kept free from their presence. And sometimes it happens that the poor party managers have to accommodate themselves to the genius they curse."

"The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress. (2014 interview)"

"The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. (New York Review of Books, 2011)"

"It has been generally believed that only the complex numbers could legitimately be used as the ground field in discussing quantum-mechanical operators. Over the complex field, Frobenius' theorem is of course not valid; the only division algebra over the complex field is formed by the complex numbers themselves. However, Frobenius' theorem is relevant precisely because the appropriate ground field for much of quantum mechanics is real rather than complex."

"I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce."

"Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't."

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

"As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."

"The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design."

"Anyone who compares the bibliography with the reprinted papers will notice that mathematics and physics have not been given equal treatment. There is a strong bias in favor of mathematics. The bias arises from the fact that mathematical papers, provided that are correct and not trivial, have permanent value, whereas most papers in physics journals are ephemeral. For this reason, it is customary to publish complete collected works of mathematicians but only selected works of physicists."

"The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible."

"In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over."

"The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward."

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

"I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems."

"All the books that I have seen about the science and the economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. … Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion."

"There’s very good news from the asteroids. It appears that a large fraction of them, including the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. Nobody imagined that. They thought they were just big rocks … It’s easier to get to an asteroid than to Mars, because the gravity is lower and landing is easier. Certainly the asteroids are much more practical, right now. If we start space colonies in, say, the next 20 years, I would put my money on the asteroids."

"There is an enormous variety of things that we never dreamed of, like... black holes, s, quasars, all these unbelievably active goings-on in the universe... [I]n Aristotle's time the universe... was supposed to be quiescent, it was supposed to be perfect and peaceful, and nothing ever happened in the ; and that remained true... throughout all of the revolutions... It remained the general view of astronomers... through Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and everybody else... until just the last 30 years, and now we know it's not like that at all. In fact the universe is full of violent events, and fantastic strong gravitational fields, and collapsed objects, and huge outpourings of energy. ...The things we understand least are the quasars... the most violent and... energetic objects in the universe, and they're totally... mysterious... and... they're rather frequent; and nobody ever dreamed that they existed... [E]ven after they were found it took a long time before people took them seriously. Nature's imagination is always richer than ours."

"... the most important questions and insights and goals are unpredictable."

"There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use."

"If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives."

"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."

"A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad."

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."

"Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual — these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."

"An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists."

"Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing. The science of today has broken out of the molds of classical nineteenth-century science, just as the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock broke out of the molds of nineteenth century art. Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in the diversity of religion."

"There is no easy solution to the conflict between fundamentalist Christian dogma and the facts of biological evolution. I am not saying that the conflict could have been altogether avoided. I am saying only that the conflict was made more bitter and more damaging, both to religion and to science, by the dogmatic and self-righteousness of scientists. What was needed was a little more human charity, a little more willingness to listen rather than to lay down the law, a little more humility. Scientists stand in need of these Christian virtues just as much as preachers do."

"Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious."

"Euclid... gave his famous definition of a point: "A point is that which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." …A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry of Euclid. This is what one means when one says that a point is a mathematical abstraction. The question, What is a point? has no satisfactory answer. Euclid's definition certainly does not answer it. The right way to ask the question is: How does the concept of a point fit into the logical structure of Euclid's geometry? ...It cannot be answered by a definition."

"Imagine, if you can, four things that have very different sizes. First, the entire universe. Second, the planet Earth. Third, the nucleus of an atom. Fourth, a superstring. The step in size from each of these things to the next is roughly the same... twenty powers of ten...."

"What philosophical conclusions should we draw from the abstract style of the superstring theory? We might conclude, as Sir James Jeans concluded long ago, that the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a Pure Mathematician, and that if we work hard enough at mathematics we shall be able to read his mind. Or we might conclude that our pursuit of abstractions is leading us far away from those parts of the creation which are most interesting from a human point of view. It is too early yet to come to conclusions."

"Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination."

"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."

"... informed me that my theological standpoint is Socinian. ...If I remember correctly what Hartshorne said, the main tenant ...is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. ...I merely find ...[this doctrine] congenial, and consistent with common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond our comprehension. ...either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at... present... We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. If... left behind, it is an end. If we keep growing, it is a beginning."

"The expansion of life, moving out from Earth into its inheritance, is an even greater theme than the expansion of England across the Atlantic. As Hakluyt wrote that there is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia, I am saying that there is under our noses the territory of nine planets, forty moons, ten thousand asteroids and a trillion comets."

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."

"Human beings are so constituted that we take for granted the fact that a direct awareness of our past selves is preserved... We take for granted the durability of the individual self. ...But ...the preservation of memories ...is as great an exercise in magic as the transfer of memories from the dead to the living. ...How the magic works ...is still a dark mystery. ...When once the technology exists to read and write memories from one mind to another, the age of mental exploration will begin in earnest. ...[W]e will look at nature directly through the eyes of the elephant, the eagle and the whale. We will... feel in our own minds the pride of the peacock and the wrath of the lion. That magic is no greater than the magic that enables me to see the rocking horse through the eyes of the child who rode it sixty years ago."

"I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology. We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of religion. We have also seen large numbers of people inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing education and medical care to the poor, helping to abolish slavery and spread peace among nations. Religion amplifies the good and evil tendencies of individual souls. Religion will always remain a powerful force in the history of our species. To me, the meaning of progress in religion is simply this, that as we move from the past to the future the good works inspired by religion should more and more prevail over the evil."

"One of the great but less famous heroes of World War Two was Andre Trocme, the Protestant pastor of the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon in France, which sheltered and saved the lives of five thousand Jews under the noses of the Gestapo. Forty years later Pierre Sauvage, one of the Jews who was saved, recorded the story of the village in a magnificent documentary film with the title, "Weapons of the Spirit". The villagers proved that civil disobedience and passive resistance could be effective weapons, even against Hitler. Their religion gave them the courage and the discipline to stand firm. Progress in religion means that, as time goes on, religion more and more takes the side of the victims against the oppressors."

"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."

"I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe."

"My personal theology is described in the Gifford lectures that I gave at Aberdeen in Scotland in 1985, published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence."

"I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity."

"The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic. Perhaps I may claim as evidence for progress in religion the fact that we no longer burn heretics."

"All through our history, we have been changing the world with our technology. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and grey. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Grey technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil and electricity, automobiles and airplanes and rockets, telephones and computers. Civilization began with green technology, with agriculture and animal-breeding, ten thousand years ago. Then, beginning about three thousand years ago, grey technology became dominant, with mining and metallurgy and machinery. For the last five hundred years, grey technology has been racing ahead and has given birth to the modern world of cities and factories and supermarkets. The dominance of grey technology is now coming to an end."

"Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty. I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job."

"The gospel of St. Matthew told of the angry Jesus driving the merchants and money-changers out of the temple, knocking over the tables of the money-changers and spilling their coins on the floor. Jesus was not opposed to capitalism and the profit motive, so long as economic activities were carried on outside the temple. In the parable of the talents, he praises the servant who used his master's money to make a profitable investment, and condemns the servant who was too timid to invest. But he draws a clear line at the temple door. Inside the temple, the ground belongs to God and profit-making must stop."

"In the time of Jesus and for many centuries afterwards, there was a free market in human bodies. The institution of slavery was based on the legal right of slave-owners to buy and sell their property in a free market. Only in the nineteenth century did the abolitionist movement, with Quakers and other religious believers in the lead, succeed in establishing the principle that the free market does not extend to human bodies. The human body is God's temple and not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes. Let us hope that we can reach a consensus on this question without fighting another civil war."

"Like all the new technologies that have arisen from scientific knowledge, biotechnology is a tool that can be used either for good or for evil purposes. The role of ethics is to strengthen the good and avoid the evil."

"Unfortunately a large number of people in many countries are strongly opposed to green technology, for reasons having little to do with the real dangers. It is important to treat the opponents with respect, to pay attention to their fears, to go gently into the new world of green technology so that neither human dignity nor religious conviction is violated. If we can go gently, we have a good chance of achieving within a hundred years the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice that green technology brings within our reach."

"I have five minutes left to give you a message to take home. The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, almost four hundred years ago. Bacon was the smartest man of his time, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare."

"I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature."

"To talk about the end of science is just as foolish as to talk about the end of religion. Science and religion are both still close to their beginnings, with no ends in sight. Science and religion are both destined to grow and change in the millennia that lie ahead of us, perhaps solving some old mysteries, certainly discovering new mysteries of which we yet have no inkling."

"After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century."

"Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect."

"Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions."

"In the little town of Princeton where I live, we have more than twenty churches and at least one synagogue, providing different forms of worship and belief for different kinds of people. They do more than any other organizations in the town to hold the community together. Within this community of people, held together by religious traditions of human brotherhood and sharing of burdens, a smaller community of professional scientists also flourishes."

"The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich."

"Scientists and business leaders who care about social justice should join forces with environmental and religious organizations to give political clout to ethics. Science and religion should work together to abolish the gross inequalities that prevail in the modern world. That is my vision, and it is the same vision that inspired Francis Bacon four hundred years ago, when he prayed that through science God would "endow the human family with new mercies"."

"There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is true of poetry. ... Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity."

"The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science."

"I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless, and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other chemicals essential to life."

"Over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land."

"Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague."

"Science as subversion has a long history. ... Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children. ... We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice."

"Gödel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas."

"It is a curious paradox that several of the greatest and most creative spirits in science, after achieving important discoveries by following their unfettered imaginations, were in their later years obsessed with reductionist philosophy and as a result became sterile. Hilbert was a prime example of this paradox. Einstein was another."

"Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions... that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. ... In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein ... was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. ... Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although... they were his most important contribution to science. ... Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way."

"The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. ... A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. ... Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. ... Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant."

"Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our Universe. They are a fundamental driving force of its evolution. They are a dominant source of energy. For every ounce of matter consumed, they yield more than ten times as much energy as the nuclear reactions of fusion and fission that cause our sun to shine and our hydrogen bombs to explode."

"Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. ... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium ... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay ... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. ... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics."

"Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies ... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929 ... [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator."

"Astronomers have so far escaped the extreme specialization that has overtaken physicists. Telescopes are big, but they are not as complicated as accelerators. Observations with a big telescope can be carried out in hours rather than years."

"Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery waiting to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than the stuff that we can see."

"When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. ... Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision."

"It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. ... The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian."

"It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that does not exist between science and other religions."

"It is more difficult for a modern scientist to be a serious Christian, like Polkinghorne, than to be a serious Muslim, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicisit Abdus Salam. Salam happily proclaimed his Muslim faith but did not feel any need to write books about it. For Salam, the idea of a conflict between his faith and his science was ludicrous. Muslim faith has nothing to do with science. But Polkinghorne writes books to prove to himself and to us that his theology and his science can live together harmoniously.."

"The common root of modern science and Christian theology was Greek philosophy. The historical accident that caused the Christian religion to become heavily theological was the fact that Jesus was born in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire at the time when the prevailing culture was profoundly Greek."

"I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since."

"Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. ... Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. ... As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. ... The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton ... I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working."

"Mr Dyson is absolutely unusual in his ability and accomplishments. I can say without reservation that he is the best I have ever had or observed."

"When Freeman Dyson, the physicist, greeted John Forbes Nash, Jr. at the Institute for Advanced Study one day in the early 1990s, he hardly expected a response. A mathematics legend in his twenties, Nash had suffered for decades from a devastating mental illness. A mute, ghost-like figure who scrawled mysterious messages on blackboards and occupied himself with numerological calculations, he was known around Princeton only as “the Phantom.” To Dyson’s astonishment, Nash replied. He’d seen Dyson’s daughter, an authority on computers, on the news, he said. “It was beautiful,” recalled Dyson. “Slowly, he just somehow woke up.”"

"Freeman Dyson’s winning the took many people by surprise, including Dyson... the Templeton Foundation gave its... prize for "progress in religion"... In receiving a million dollars, Dyson may have lost his amateur status as a theologian. ...In Dyson's acceptance speech he sounded the themes... that good works... are better than volumes of theology; that both science and religion... grapple with mysteries; that God and mind... are one and actively present simultaneously at the microscopic level of atoms, at the macroscopic level of human beings, and at the cosmic level of the universe... that green technology... is reexerting its primacy over gray technology... machines and fossil fuels; that the marketing of high-tech and the capitalist system... must be tempered by ethics; that this attention to social justice will... help alleviate human misery and enlarge the global economy; and that we must utilize both... science and religion... Dyson should probably be placed somewhere between a pantheist and a deist whose God is a kind of meta-scientific, ."

"Many people know of the mathematician but not the engineer. Some had read of Dyson the physicist but not Dyson the diplomat. They had read Disturbing the Universe but not '. They might have known about Orion and but not about Socinus. ...Dyson had not won the... Nobel for... explaining way the infinities... when you get closer and closer to the electron... relying on an artful redefinition of the mass and charge... But he had won ...[the Templeton prize] for explaining the disparities that arise when you use science to explain the whole universe, physical and moral. Dyson's attempt at smoothing over potential conflicts between science and religion had swept the apparent incompatibility not under the carpet but out beyond the edge of the universe."

"You'll have received an application from Mr Freeman Dyson to come to work with you as a graduate student. I hope that you will accept him. Although he is only 23 he is in my view the best mathematician in England."

"Freeman’s gift? … It’s cosmic. He is able to see more interconnections between more things than almost anybody. He sees the interrelationships, whether it’s in some microscopic physical process or in a big complicated machine like Orion. He has been, from the time he was in his teens, capable of understanding essentially anything that he’s interested in. He’s the most intelligent person I know."

"Man occupies a special place in the Cartesian scheme. He alone is endowed with mind. Descartes believed that animals did not possess one, that they were simply extremely complicated automatons. Other thinkers have rejected this point of view and proposed to endow all matter in the universe — living or inanimate — with consciousness. This "panpsychism" has been promoted by, among others, Teilhard de Chardin and, more recently by the British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, who holds that mind is present in every particle of matter."

"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it.""

"The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it."

"By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race."

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."

"It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense."

"Einstein analyses the ideas of time-order and of simultaneity. Primarily (according to his analysis) time-order only refers to the succession of events at a given place. Accordingly each given place has its own time-order. But these time-orders are not independent in the system of nature, and their correlation is known to us by means of physical measurement. Now ultimately all physical measurement depends upon coincidence in time and place."

"Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ... identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close ... The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature."

"In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty."

"There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality."

"Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected."

"We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities."

"We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy."

"It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows."

"Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study."

"Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place."

"Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests."

"The Reformation was a popular uprising, and for a century and a half drenched Europe in blood. The beginnings of the Scientific movement were confined to a minority among the intellectual elite.… [T]he worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed. The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir."

"The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society."

"More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society."

"Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."

"If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations."

"The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit."

"[T]he pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit."

"Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact."

"If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."

"When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch."

"[T]he order of nature cannot be justified by the mere observation of nature. For there is nothing in the present fact which inherently refers either to the past or to the future.… [I]t illustrates the anti-rationalism of the scientific public that, when Hume did appear, it was only the religious implications of his philosophy which attracted attention. This was because the clergy were in principle rationalists, whereas the men of science were content with a simple faith in the order of nature."

"[N]ature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind."

"You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility."

"No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age."

"[N]ature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process."

"It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."

"The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam."

"In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world."

"In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness."

"The salvation of reality is its obstinate, irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts."

"The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention."

"In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality."

"Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide."

"Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth."

"All science must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions are justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions."

"Epochs do not rise from the dead.… [W]hereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation than that which a masquerade bears to real life. There may be understanding of the past, but there is a difference between the modern and the ancient reactions to the same stimuli."

"Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance."

"The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul."

"Often things realised in thought are more vivid than than the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come to a stop when we come to explore ever higher grades of complexity in their realised relationships. We always find that we have thought of just this — whatever it may be — and of no more."

"No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality."

"He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it.Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying Him metaphysical compliments. He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success."

"It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment."

"A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an opportunity."

"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory."

"[W]e cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought."

"In the first place for over two centuries religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive.[…] The result of the repetition of this undignified retreat, during many generations, has at last almost entirely destroyed the intellectual authority of religious thinkers. Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development."

"I now come to the second reason for the modern fading of interest in religion.[…] Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression."

"Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."

"The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience."

"The power of God is the worship He inspires.[…] The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure."

"There is something between the gross specialised values of the mere practical man, and the thin specialised values of the mere scholar. Both types have missed something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not obtain the missing elements."

"Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality."

"[F]ertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art."

"Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure."

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."

"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge."

"For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance."

"The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable."

"The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity."

"That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience."

"The universities are schools of education, and schools of research. But the primary reason for their existence is not to be found either in the mere knowledge conveyed to the students or in the mere opportunities for research afforded to the members of the faculty. Both these functions could be performed at a cheaper rate, apart from these very expensive institutions. Books are cheap, and the system of apprenticeship is well understood. So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century. Yet the chief impetus to the foundation of universities came after that date, and in more recent times has even increased. The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning."

"In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst]."

"Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning."

"What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity."

"The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader."

"There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."

"The chief error in philosophy is overstatement."

"In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate."

"Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought."

"Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography."

"Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection."

"Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration."

"The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many."

"Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity."

"The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction."

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

"Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system."

"The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities."

"The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence."

"There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross."

"The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort."

"Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest."

"There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt."

"A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics."

"In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence."

"Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is."

"Error is the price we pay for progress."

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order."

"Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification."

"For the kingdom of heaven is with us today."

"We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore."

"No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing."

"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."

"Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour."

"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and floats on gossamer for deductions."

"Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."

"Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance."

"The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia."

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."

"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul."

"A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace."

"A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay."

"I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t."

"Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics."

"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content."

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it."

"Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended."

"Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude."

"A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself."

"What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike."

"The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance."

"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern."

"A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives."

"With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful."

"Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies."

"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."

"The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage."

"Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry."

"Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophical works pushed back heretofore perceived boundaries of thought and re-framed Western epistemology."

"Professor Whitehead has recently restored a seventeenth century phrase—"climate of opinion." The phrase is much needed. Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained."

"Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history. Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that."

"In "Religion in the Making," by A. N. Whitehead... the approach is philosophical, and there are many interesting and valuable observations. But Dr. Whitehead occasionally indulges himself, like all metaphysicians, in what has a suspicious resemblance to nonsense."

"Mr. Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that one of our chief literary sins is in thinking of past and future in terms of a thousand years forward and backward, when really to experience the organic nature of past and future one should think of time in the order of a second, or a fraction of a second. One can make a similar remark about our esthetic perceptions... one of the signs of a rational enjoyment of the machine and the machine-made environment is to be concerned with much smaller differences and to react sensitively to them."

"As a teacher I regard Whitehead as perfect."

"In a book called Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead points out that perception is usually a matter of symbols, just like language; I say I see a book when I actually see a red oblong. The Transactionists (who have been influenced by Whitehead rather than Husserl) take this one stage further, and point out that when I 'perceive' something, I am actually making a bet with myself that what I perceive is what I think it is. In order to act and live at all, I have to make these bets; I cannot afford to make absolutely certain that things are what I think they are. But this means that we should not take our perceptions at face value, any more than Nietzsche was willing to take philosophy at its face value; we must allow for prejudice and distortion."

"Whitehead’s mode of thought is, to a remarkable extent, reminiscent of ancient Buddhism… ."

"[Whitehead’s claims] cannot be observed, directly and separately, by a mind untrained in introspective meditation... Just as the minute living beings in the microcosm of a drop of water become visible only through a microscope, so, too, the exceedingly short-lived processes in the world of mind become cognizable only with the help of a very subtle mental scrutiny, and that only obtains as a result of meditative training. None but the kind of introspective mindfulness or attention (satti ) that has acquired, in meditative absorption, a high degree of inner equipoise, purity and firmness (upekkha-sati-parisuddhi ), will possess the keenness, subtlety and quickness of cognitive response required for such delicate mental microscopy. Without that … only the way of inference from comparisons between various fragmentary series of thought moments will be open as a means of research."

"What is surprising is Whitehead’s determination to attribute the origins of his thought solely to Western sources. While the Western precedents he cites are at best weak analogues, the Buddhist tenets from which his system derives are clearcut and extremely detailed. His arguments are strongest and most lucid when they are framed using Buddhist models; they become vague and confusing when he turns speculative and tries to appear original in both terminology and framework. Anyone knowledgeable in Buddhism would find his attempts very unconvincing in their attribution to Western philosophers as his theoretical predecessors."

"Whitehead made his theory Christianity-friendly by superimposing God upon the process. From the Buddhist point of view, this is both gratuitous and inconsistent. His appropriation of Buddhism as a philosophy of science and then as a theology compatible with Christianity became very popular among Christian theologians. Several of them, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Karl Rahner, started advancing a curious blend known as Process Theology. This is now considered a mainstream Christian theology and pointing out its Indian origins is fiercely opposed, almost to the point of censorship."

"The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate any need for intelligent thought."

"The purpose of thinking is so our thoughts die instead of us."

"Considering how readily musicologists criticize one another – witness the merciless footnotes (and reviews) of so many books and articles – the innocent bystander must find it strange that they remain unwilling to venture judgments about the quality of the music around which they work…But it is hard to see what can be the purpose of musicology if not to advise people on what to hear and how to hear it. Separating out the good, the bad and the indifferent, and helping listeners enjoy the best, is surely the least we can offer society in return for our keep."

"I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary."

"As Voltaire once remarked, "It is the privilege of the real genius, especially one who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity." The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. For that reason there has been, ever since, a watershed in understanding between those who have taken his work on board and those who have not. For a good many of the problems he uncovered, the solutions he put forward have not stood the test of time, but his uncovering of the problems remains the most illuminating thing a philosopher has ever done. Because of the fundamental character of these problems, and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since."

"The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as "mankind's need for metaphysics.""

"Some of my readers may find themselves thinking that the mere fact that millions of human beings, including many highly intelligent and deeply thoughtful ones, have had strongly held religious beliefs is itself a reason for giving them serious intellectual attention — not necessarily for believing them, of course, but for finding them interesting and for treating them with respect. I would agree with this if the reasons given for them commanded respect. But I have yet to encounter such reasons. What are claimed as proofs are not proofs, and all such "proofs" have long since been discredited, the most important of them by Christians themselves, such as Kant. Yet they go on being trotted out: assertions are made without evidence; mutually contradictory claims proliferate; historical knowledge is defied; mistranslations abound; language is used in a way that slithers unacknowledged between literal meaning and metaphor; the whole vocabulary rests on unsecured presuppositions. Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me."

"Speaking for myself, I am not one of those people who are able to deal with the problem by ignoring the questions: it may be a matter of temperament, but for me the apparent unanswerability of the questions sharpens the persistence with which they nag at my mind. Scarcely a day has gone by since my childhood in which I have not thought of them. In fact, the truth is that I have lived my life in thrall to them. They seem to me obviously the most important and interesting questions there are, and in my heart of hearts I do not really understand why not everybody sees them as such. And yet at the end of it all I have no solutions. I am as baffled now by the larger metaphysical questions of my existence as I was when I was a child — indeed more so, because my understanding of the depths and difficulties of the questions themselves is now so much greater."

"It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all."

"In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low."

"...the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things [are] made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized."

"...we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a "system" and with "methods" since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos."

"A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes."

"When we know those moments, when we smile, when we let go, when we are not on guard at all – these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it – for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed."

"Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.... These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they [patterns in the space] are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made."

"On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations... It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur .... If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space."

"Look more carefully...to find out what it really is that is repeating there .... Beyond its elements, each building [or town] is defined by certain patterns of relationships among the elements.... These relationships are not extra, but necessary to the elements... The elements themselves are patterns of relationships."

"One begins to think with that new building block, rather than with littler pieces. And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town."

"...a great architect's creative power, his capacity to make something beautiful, lies in his capacity to observe correctly, and deeply. A painter's talent lies in his capacity to see – he sees more acutely, more precisely, what it is that really matters in a thing, and where its qualities come from."

"Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmision from person to person."

"...every pattern we define must be formulated in the form of a rule which establishes a relationship between a context, a system of forces which arises in that context, and a configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves in that context."

"I always had a sceptical and slightly morbid caste of mind, so my first response to Humpty Dumpty was "Did he fall or was he pushed?" I was drawn to the macabre, and for some reason I was very interested, from earliest childhood, in death. I seemed to think about it a great deal. It may have been something to do with the war, which overshadowed my childhood. My father talked about it a lot. It was like a great universal pain."

"One of my earliest loves was the Book of Common Prayer. I was seduced by it, by its beautiful words and the sense of history."

"My English teacher, Miss Daisy Dalgliesh, really made Shakespeare live for me, although I didn't see it on stage until I was an adult. I named my detective after her. It was years later that I found out her father was called Adam Dalgliesh."

"Unless the young can use language effectively, both to express their own minds and to understand the minds of others, it is difficult to see how we can have a vigorous democracy in which ideas and policies can be intelligently presented, considered and criticised or achieve that understanding with other countries which nations enjoy through access to each other's language and literature."

"Because English is spoken and written in so many forms for a variety of purposes throughout the world it is surely important that English in its highest form should be taught, spoken and valued in this country. Yet few would deny that standards of written and spoken English are in decline among all sections of the community and that we are in real danger of becoming an illiterate society."

"We also had the inestimable advantage of beginning each school day with an act of worship which included a reading from the King James Bible which, with the Book of Common Prayer, has had more influence on our language, literature, history and culture than any other book, but which today a majority of our children will never encounter."

"We cannot aspire to a "classless society", whatever that may mean, if some children are disadvantaged the moment they open their mouths, or if we arrogantly assume that only the young from certain backgrounds are capable of enjoying Shakespeare. Language and literature are not static. They change, develop, grow from the past and feed on the past. If we simply cease to care, if we debase, abuse, neglect our language and our literature, the time will come when reading will be the pursuit of a privileged élite and we shall no longer produce books worth reading or have a language and literature worth preserving."

"I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism."

"I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern."

"Cordelia was fumbling in her shoulder bag for her own key. As usual the object most required had fallen to the bottom of the bag."

"Invited by Major Markland to sit, Cordelia perched on the edge of the sofa, half expecting the smooth cushion to let out a rude noise as it subsided beneath her. She found it, however, unexpectedly hard."

"It was only in fiction that the people one wanted to interview were sitting ready at home or in their office, with time, energy and interest to spare. In real life they were about their own business and one waited on their convenience."

"It isn't what you suspect, it's what you can prove that counts."

"If there's any sort of existence after death we shall all know it soon enough. If there isn't, we shan't exist to complain that we've been cheated."

"To enjoy the sole attention of one agreeable man and no attention at all from anyone else was all she ever hoped from a party."

"Cordelia read the inscription carved deep on the headstone. "At rest": the commonest epitaph of a generation to whom rest must have seemed the ultimate luxury, the supreme benediction. "It's a nice stone, isn't it?" "Yes, it is. I was admiring the lettering." "Cut deep, that is. It cost a mint of money but it was worth it. That'll last, you see. Half the lettering here won't, it's that shallow. It takes the pleasure out of a cemetery. I like to read the grave stones, like to know who people were and when they died and how long the women lived after they buried their men. It sets you wondering how they managed and whether they were lonely. There's no use in a stone if you can't read the lettering.""

"My mother used to say, 'Don't marry for money, but marry where money is! ' There's no harm in looking for money as long as there's kindness as well."

"But what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can't love one another?"

"There were moments, usually on a sunny Easter morning, when she wished that she could with sincerity call herself a Christian; but for the rest of the year she knew herself to be what she was - incurably agnostic but prone to unpredictable relapses into faith."

"Are you sorry about Isabelle leaving?" "I am rather. Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense. I could never quite accept that Isabelle was what she is: a generous, indolent, over-affectionate and stupid young woman. I thought that any woman as beautiful as she must have an instinct about life, access to some secret wisdom which is beyond cleverness. Every time she opened that delicious mouth I was expecting her to illumine life. I think I could have spent all my life just looking at her and waiting for the oracle. And all she could talk about was clothes."

"She remembered what Bernie had told her: "In this country, if people won't talk, there's nothing you can do to make them, more's the pity. Luckily for the police most people just can't keep their mouths shut. The intelligent ones are the worst. They just have to show how clever they are, and once you've got them discussing the case, even discussing it generally, then you've got them.""

"Hunch is a good servant but a poor master."

"It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life."

"I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery."

"If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils."

"I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved."

"Use some reverence. Remember what he was only a minute ago. You wouldn't have dared laid a hand on him."

"We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life."

"Darling, you can't promise that...but I like to hear you say it."

"I didn't love him, but I liked him being in love with me."

"When my turn comes I propose to take my lethal capsule comfortably in bed at home and preferably on my own."

"Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not Governments. When governments are generous it is with other people's money, other people's safety, other people's future."

"Whatever else I am now, I'm never bored."

"I'm not a tyrant, but I can't afford to be merciful. Whatever it is necessary to do, I will do it."

"Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong, sir. Perhaps He's just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope he burns in His own Hell."

"We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we enjoyed birth. You can't share either experience."

"The Man Penal settlement. Do you know whats happening there? The murders, the starvation, the complete breakdown of law and order."

"We do. The question is, how do you?"

"I don't want to kill you."

"You're going to have to, Xan. You may have to kill her, too."

"I don't think God bargains."

"Oh yes he does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He's supposed to be just. If he wants belief He'd better provide some evidence."

"That He exists?"

"That he cares."

"How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty [i.e. in one's wife]. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn't possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being."

"They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?"

"Was there a place for him in this modern world, where systems mattered more than people?"

"His face was a mask betraying nothing."

"No one was about, yet he seemed to sense the presence of watching eyes behind blank windows."

"The street and the houses had a perfection which was almost intimidating. No weed, thought Kate, would surely dare to push its unsanctified tendrils through these carefully tended small lawns and flower beds."

"Mrs Buckley was revealed as a slight, nervous-looking woman with a small precisely formed mouth between bulging cheeks, which gave her the appearance of a hamster."

"He looked more like a professional rugger player than a lawyer, though not when he wore his wig. Then the face became an impressive mask of judicial gravitas. But, thought Langton, wigs metamorphose us all; perhaps that's why we're so unwilling to get rid of them."

"...We have a reputation for being difficult. Chambers is a collection of intelligent, highly independent, idiosyncratic, critical and overworked men and women whose profession is argument. It's a dull set which doesn't contain its share of eccentrics and personalities who could be described as difficult. ..."

"Violent death, like most disasters, afforded its satisfactions to those who were neither victim nor suspect."

"He had learned to be as wary of intuition as he was of superficial judgements, but it was hardly possible to be a long-serving detective officer and not know when a witness was lying. It wasn't always suspicious or even significant. Nearly everyone had something to hide. And it was optimistic to expect the whole truth at a first interview. A wise suspect answered questions and kept his counsel; only the naïve confused a police officer with a social worker."

"It had been the good-looking young detective and the woman officer who had interviewed her, and she had sensed that they were quietly sympathetic. But that of course had been deliberate. They had set out to get her confidence and they had succeeded. She was amazed now how much she had confided to them."

"But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis."

"A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition."

"How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos."

"What condemned a man [in a police investigation] was the inability to keep his mouth shut."

"Over the tea Enid said: "You know who controls this estate, don't you?" "Yes, the children." "The kids, the bloody kids. Complain to the police or the council and you get a brick through your window. Tell 'em off and like as not you get an earful of foul language and burning rags through the letter-box next day. And if they catch the little bastards and take them to youth court, what happens? Bloody nothing. They come home laughing. They're in gangs now by the time they're eight." Of course they are, thought Kate. How else can they survive?"

"I was glad to give up teaching, at least in London, glad to be rid of noise and violence and staff-room politics, and the constant fight to keep order."

"Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous."

"He had disciplined his mind not to speculate; speculation in advance of the facts was always futile and could be dangerous."

"She couldn't remember when her interest in him, in his mysteriousness, his silences, his power, had grown into fascination, but she knew the precise moment when fascination had sharpened into desire."

"You need to decide what you're interested in."

"If that was what she wanted to believe, why not let her?"

"She came to know a different London and she saw it through different eyes. The city was all things to all men. It reflected and deepened mood; it did not create it. Here the miserable were more miserable, the lonely more bereft, while the prosperous and happy saw reflected in its river and glittering life the confirmation of their deserved success. In her week of seeking, unsuccessfully, for a flat in which she could bear, even temporarily, to live, Philippa felt increasingly depressed and rejected."

"I don't see why escapist literature should not also be a work of art."

"The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart."

"Every novelist write what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality."

"Marriage is both the most public and the most secret of institutions, its miseries as irritatingly insistent as a hacking cough, its private malaise less easily diagnosed. And nothing is so destructive as unhappiness to social life. No one wants to sit in embarrassed silence while his host and hostess demonstrate their mutual incompatibility and dislike."

"the lesbian community is under siege, we always try to present to the heterosexual community the idealized version, but I do not think that's a good way to do it, even though I can understand where it's coming from. ("Valerie Miner talked about the kinds of self-censorship she finds in her work when she starts thinking she should present only positive images of lesbians or working-class people.") Yes. In that poem and also in the poem "Night Voice" I do that. There's this whole controversy now over media images of lesbians and gays and bisexuals. It's brought out in movies like Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs where they are presented as killers. It comes up in the novels of P. D. James, where she has these criminals who are lesbians or gay men. And I hate that. But, at the same time, I want the dirty laundry to be out there, whether it's on the Mexican culture or the lesbian culture or the bisexual. And I'm not sure how you do that."

"Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise."

"I have already expressed my opinion that the interference of the noble Lord should have been for the suppression of the trade in opium, and that the war was not justified by any excesses committed on the part of the Chinese. I have already stated, that although the Chinese were undoubtedly guilty of much absurd phraseology, of no little ostentatious pride, and of some excess, justice, in my opinion, is with them, and, that whilst they, the Pagans, and semi-civilized barbarians, have it, we, the enlightened and civilized Christians, are pursuing objects at variance both with justice, and with religion."

"The right hon. Gentleman has argued, that the adoption of the plan proposed by the Government would confer advantage on the consumer, would increase the revenue, and would give increased scope to the industry of the manufacturer. We, Sir, argue, that with an amount of benefit to the revenue altogether inconsiderable, with a slight, nay an imperceptible relief to the consumer, and with detriment to the sure interests of the British manufacturer, you are asked to abandon what is nothing less than a great principle of humanity, that has received the most solemn sanction of the Legislature, the principle of hostility to the slave-trade and to slavery."

"I have clung to the notion of a conscience, and a Catholic conscience, in the State, until that idea has become in the general mind so feeble, as to be absolutely inappreciable in the movement of public affairs. I do not know whether there is one man opposing the Maynooth Bill upon that principle. When I have found myself the last man in the ship, I think that I am free to leave it."

"Ireland, Ireland! That cloud in the west! That coming storm! That minister of God's retribution upon cruel, inveterate, and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social and great religious questions—God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face, and to work through them."

"I believe the slave trade to be by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind in any Christian or pagan country."

"This is the negation of God erected into a system of Government."

"From the ancient strife of territorial acquisition we are labouring, I trust and believe, to substitute another, a peaceful and a fraternal strife among nations, the honest and the noble race of industry and art."

"[I]f it be true that, at periods now long past, England has had her full share of influence in stimulating by her example the martial struggles of the world, may she likewise be forward, now and hereafter, to show that she has profited by the heavy lessons of experience, and to be—if, indeed, in the designs of Providence, she is elected to that office—the standard-bearer of the nations upon the fruitful paths of peace, industry, and commerce."

"[W]hile we have sought to do justice to the great labouring community of England by further extending their relief from indirect taxation, we have not been guided by any desire to put one class against another; we have felt we should best maintain our own honour, that we should best meet the views of Parliament, and best promote the interests of the country, by declining to draw any invidious distinction between class and class, by adopting it to ourselves as a sacred aim, to diffuse and distribute—burden if we must; benefit if we may—with equal and impartial hand; and we have the consolation of believing that by proposals such as these we contribute, as far as in us lies, not only to develop the material resources of the country, but to knit the hearts of the various classes of this great nation yet more closely than heretofore to that Throne and to those institutions under which it is their happiness to live."

"When we speak of general war, we don't mean real progress on the road of freedom, the real, moral, and social advancement of man, achieved by force. This may be the intention, but how rarely is it the result of general war! We mean this:—That the face of nature is stained with human gore—we mean that taxation is increased and industry diminished—we know that it means that burdens unreasonable and untold are entailed on late posterity—we know that it means that demoralization is let loose, that families are broken up, that lusts become unbridled in every country to which that war is extended."

"All the terms that we demanded have, since the war began, been substantially conceded...My hon. Friend...[said] that we must obtain a success in order that we may secure better terms; but that is not the public and popular sentiment; the popular feeling is, that as to terms there is no great matter at issue, but that what you want is more military success...It is not only indefensible—it is hideous, it is anti-Christian, it is immoral, it is inhuman; and you have no right to make war simply for what you call success. If, when you have obtained the objects of the war, you continue it in order to obtain military glory...I say you tempt the justice of Him in whose hands the fates of armies are as absolutely lodged as the fate of the infant slumbering in its cradle; you tempt Him to launch upon you His wrath; and if this be courage, I, for one, have no courage to enter upon such a course. I believe it to be alike guilty and unwise."

"There is but one way of maintaining permanently what I may presume to call the great international policy and law of Europe—but one way of keeping within bounds any one of the Powers possessed of such strength as France, England, or Russia, if it be bent on an aggressive policy, and that is, by maintaining not so much great fleets, or other demonstrations of physical force, which I believe to be really an insignificant part of the case, but the moral union—the effective concord of Europe."

"There is a policy going a begging; the general policy that Sir Robert Peel in 1841 took office to support—the policy of peace abroad, of economy, of financial equilibrium, of steady resistance to abuses, and promotion of practical improvements at home, with a disinclination to questions of reform, gratuitously raised."

"To maintain a steady surplus of income over expenditure—to lower indirect taxes when excessive in amount for the relief of the people and bearing in mind the reproductive power inherent in such operations—to simplify our fiscal system by concentrating its pressure on a few well chosen articles of extended consumption—and to conciliate support to the income tax by marking its temporary character and by associating it with beneficial changes in the laws: these aims have been for fifteen years the labour of our life."

"Sir, there is not war with China, but what is there? There is hostility. There is bloodshed. There is a trampling down of the weak by the strong. There is the terrible and abominable retaliation of the weak upon the strong. You are now occupied in this House by revolting and harrowing details about a Chinese baker who has poisoned bread, by proclamations for the capture of British heads, and the waylaying of a postal steamer. And these things you think strengthen your case. Why, they deepen your guilt. They place you more completely in the wrong. War taken at the best is a frightful scourge to the human race; but because it is so the wisdom of ages has surrounded it with strict laws and usages, and has required formalities to be observed which shall act as a curb upon the wild passions of man, to prevent that scourge from being let loose unless under circumstances of full deliberation and from absolute necessity. You have dispensed with all these precautions. You have turned a consul into a diplomatist, and that metamorphosed consul is forsooth to be at liberty to direct the whole might of England against the lives of a defenceless people. While war is a scourge and curse to man it is yet attended with certain compensations. It is attended with acts of heroic self-sacrifice and of unbounded daring. It is ennobled by a consciousness that you are meeting equals in the field, and that while you challenge the issue of life or death you at least enter into a fair encounter. But you go to China and make war upon those who stand before you as women or children. They try to resist you; they call together their troops; they load their guns; they kill one man and wound another in action, but while they are doing so you perhaps slay thousands. They are unable to meet you in the field. You have no equality of ground on which to meet them. You can earn no glory in such warfare. And it is those who put the British flag to such uses that stain it. It is not from them that we are to hear rhetorical exaggerations on the subject of the allegiance that we owe to the national standard. Such is the case of the war in China. And what do these people — who have no means of offering you open resistance — who are women and children before you — what do they do when you make war with them? They resort to those miserable and detestable contrivances for the destruction of their enemies which their weakness teaches them. It is not the first time in the history of the world. Have you never read of those rebellions of the slaves which have risen to the dignity of being called wars, and which stand recorded in history as the servile wars? Is it not notorious that among all the wars upon record those have been the most terrible, ferocious, and destructive? And why? Because those who have been trampled upon have observed no limit in the gratification of their feeling of revenge against their oppressors; and however wrong may have been their excesses in the abstract, those excesses could not become a just subject of complaint on the part of those who had provoked them. Every account that reaches us of the cruelties and the atrocities to which this war gives rise only deepens the pain and the shame with which I look back, and with which I trust the majority of this House will look back, on the origin of this deplorable contest."

"At a time when sentiments are so much divided, every man I trust, will give his vote with the recollection and the consciousness that it may depend upon his single vote whether the miseries, the crimes, the atrocities that I fear are now proceeding in China are to be discountenanced or not. We have now come to the crisis of the case. England is not yet committed. But if an adverse vote be given...England will have been committed. With you then, with us, with every one of us, it rests to show that this House, which is the first, the most ancient, and the noblest temple of freedom in the world, is also the temple of that everlasting justice without which freedom itself would be only a name or only a curse to mankind. And I cherish the trust and belief that when you, Sir, rise in your place to-night to declare the numbers of the division from the chair which you adorn, the words which you speak will go forth from the walls of the House of Commons, not only as a message of mercy and peace, but also as a message of British justice and British wisdom, to the farthest corners of the world."

"Decision by majorities is as much an expedient, as lighting by gas."

"Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place."

"What has been the state of things since 1853? It is useless to blink the fact that not merely within the circle of the public departments and of Cabinets, but throughout the country at large, and within the precincts of this House—the guardians of the purse of the people—the spirit of public economy has been relaxed; charges upon the public funds of every kind have been admitted from time to time upon slight examination; every man's petition and prayer for this or that expenditure has been conceded with a facility which I do not hesitate to say you have only to continue for some five or ten years longer in order to bring the finances of the country into a state of absolute confusion."

"I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards."

"[T]he great aim—the moral and political significance of the act, and its probable and desired fruit in binding the two countries together by interest and affection. Neither you nor I attach for the moment any superlative value to this Treaty for the sake of the extension of British trade. ... What I look to is the social good, the benefit to the relations of the two countries, and the effect on the peace of Europe."

"Sir, there was once a time when close relations of amity were established between the Governments of England and France. It was in the reign of the later Stuarts; and it marks a dark spot in our annals, because it was an union formed in a spirit of domineering ambition on the one side, and of base and vile subserviency on the other. But that, Sir, was not an union of the nations; it was an union of the Governments. This is not be an union of the Governments; it is to be an union of the nations."

"Our proposals involve a great reform in our tariff, they involve a large remission of taxation, and last of all, though not least, they include that Commercial Treaty with France... By pursuing such a course as this it will be in your power to scatter blessings among the people, and blessings which are among the soundest and most wholesome of all the blessings at your disposal, because in legislation of this kind you are not forging mechanical helps for men, nor endeavouring to do that for them which they ought to do for themselves; but you are enlarging their means without narrowing their freedom, you are giving value to their labour, you are appealing to their sense of responsibility, and you are not impairing their sense of honourable self-dependence."

"For my own part I am deeply convinced that all excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste—for that is a comparatively trifling matter—but a great political and a great moral evil. It is a characteristic of the mischief which arise from financial prodigality, that they creep onwards with a noiseless and surreptitious step; that they are unseen and unfelt until they have reached a magnitude absolutely overwhelming, and then at length, we see them, as perhaps they now exist in the case of one at least among the great European nations, so fearful and menacing in their aspect that they seem to threaten the very foundations of national existence."

"[T]he right hon. Gentleman the Member for Stroud says of this Budget...[that] it is a mortal stab at the Constitution. I want to know to what Constitution does it give a mortal stab? In my opinion it gives no mortal stab, and no stab at all. But, on the contrary, so far as it alters anything in the most recent practice, it alters in the direction of restoring that good old Constitution which took its root in Saxon times, which grew under the Plantagenets, which endured the hard rule of the Tudors, and resisted the aggressions of the Stuarts, and which has now come to such perfect maturity under the rule of the House of Brunswick."

"We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a Nation... We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North. I cannot but believe that that event is as certain as any event yet future and countingent can be."

"I mean this, that together with the so-called increase of expenditure there grows up what may be termed a spirit which, insensibly and unconsciously perhaps, but really, affects the spirit of the people, the spirit of parliament, the spirit of the public departments, and perhaps even the spirit of those whose duty it is to submit the estimates to parliament."

"But how is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment."

"I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution. ...fitness for the franchise, when it is shown to exist—as I say it is shown to exist in the case of a select portion of the working class—is not repelled on sufficient grounds from the portals of the Constitution by the allegation that things are well as they are. I contend, moreover, that persons who have prompted the expression of such sentiments as those to which I have referred, and whom I know to have been Members of the working class, are to be presumed worthy and fit to discharge the duties of citizenship, and that to admission to the discharge of those duties they are well and justly entitled."

"What are the qualities which fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors."

"As to his Goddess Reason, I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we neither want nor warmly relish in England."

"At last, my friends, I am come amongst you. And I am come…unmuzzled."

"I am a member of a Liberal Government. I am in association with the Liberal party. I have never swerved from what I conceived to be those truly Conservative objects and desires with which I entered life. I am, if possible, more fondly attached to the institutions of my country than I was when as a boy I wandered among the sand-hills of Seaforth or the streets of Liverpool. But experience has brought with it its lessons. I have learnt that there is wisdom in a policy of trust, and folly in a policy of mistrust. I have not refused to receive the signs of the times. I have observed the effect that has been produced by Liberal legislation, and if we are told...that all the feelings of the country are in the best and broadest sense Conservative,—that is to say, that the people value the country and the laws and institutions of the country; if we are told that, I say honesty compels us to admit that result has been brought about by Liberal legislation."

"The position of England, gentlemen, is a peculiar position in the world. England has inherited from bygone ages more, perhaps, of what was most august and venerable in those ages than any other European country, and at the same time that her traditions of the past are so rich and fruitful that all our minds and all our characters have both within our knowledge and beyond our knowledge been largely moulded by them. ... [G]eographically she stands with Europe on one side of her and America on the other, so she stands between those feudal institutions in which European society was formed, and which have given her hierarchy of class, and on the other side those principles of equality forming the basis of society in America."

"It is sometimes said that the measure we propose is a democratic measure. The word “democracy” has very different senses, if by democracy be meant liberty—if by democracy be meant the extension to each man in his own sphere of every privilege and of every franchise that he can exercise with advantage to himself and with safety to the State,—then I must confess I don't see much to alarm us in the word democracy. (Cheers.) But if by democracy be meant the enthroning of ignorance against knowledge, the setting up of vice in opposition to virtue, the disregard of rank, the forgetfulness of what our fathers have done for us, indifference or coldness with regard to the inheritance we enjoy, then, Gentlemen, I for one—and I believe for all I have the honour to address—am in that sense the enemy of democracy."

"My position then, Sir, in regard to the Liberal party is in all points the opposite of Earl Russell's. ... I have none of the claims he possesses. I came among you an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from them, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by the slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to make use of the legal phraseology, in pauperis forma. I had nothing to offer you but faithful and honourable service. ... You received me with kindness, indulgence, generosity, and I may even say with some measure of confidence. And the relation between us has assumed such a form that you never can be my debtors, but that I must for ever be in your debt."

"[T]here appeared to me to have grown up under the present Government a system of what I called, in regard to the public expenditure, making things pleasant all round. That means going from town to town, granting what this community wants, granting what that community wants, granting what the other community wants, and leaving out of sight that huge public which unfortunately has not got the voices and the advocates ready always to defend it against these local and particular claims, but of which it is our highest boast that we seek to be the advocates and the champions."

"If you want to be served you must draw the distinction between those who want to serve you and those who don't, and if the electors of South Lancashire and of the country generally are contented to allow this method of expenditure to go on, this Continental system of feeding the desires of classes and portions of the community at the expense of the whole—it is idle for you to satisfy yourselves with vague and general promises. ... If that is to be the system on which public finance is to be administered you must be prepared to resign all hopes of remission of taxation, even in good years, and in bad years you must look for a steady augmentation of the income-tax."

"[W]e find and we know that this attempt in Ireland to make the power and influence of the State the means of supporting one creed against another has been the plague and the scourge of the country—has divided man from man, class from class, kingdom from kingdom, and in this great, and ancient, and noble empire has had the effect of now exhibiting us to the world as a divided country—three kingdoms, two of which we are indeed heartily united and associated, but the third of which offers to mankind a spectacle painful and full of schism and destruction within itself, and alienation and estrangement as regards the Throne and Constitution of this realm."

"The only means which have been placed in my power of "raising the wages of colliers" has been by endeavouring to beat down all those restrictions upon trade which tend to reduce the price to be obtained for the product of their labour, & to lower as much as may be the taxes on the commodities which they may require for use or for consumption. Beyond this I look to the forethought not yet so widely diffused in this country as in Scotland, & in some foreign lands; & I need not remind you that in order to facilitate its exercise the Government have been empowered by Legislation to become through the Dept. of the P.O. the receivers & guardians of savings."

"Hephaistos bears in Homer the double stamp of a Nature-Power, representing the element of fire, and of an anthropomorphic deity who is the god of art at a period when the only fine art known was in works of metal produced by the aid of fire."

"The transfer of the allegiance and citizenship, of no small part of the heart and life, of human beings from one sovereignty to another, without any reference to their own consent, has been a great reproach to some former transactions in Europe; has led to many wars and disturbances; is hard to reconcile with considerations of equity; and is repulsive to the sense of modern civilization."

"I am much oppressed with the idea that this transfer of human beings like chattels should go forward without any voice from collective Europe if it be disposed to speak."

"In moral forces, and in their growing effect upon European politics, I have a great faith: possibly on that very account, I am free to confess, sometimes a misleading one."

"On the whole, it seems reasonable to hope that the practical character of our Teutonic cousins [Germany], together with their huge actual mass of domestic sorrows, will assist them to settle down into a mood of peace and goodwill. But whether they do or not, it is idle to apprehend that they have before them a career of universal conquest or absolute predominance, and that the European family is not strong enough to correct the eccentricities of its pecant and obstreperous members."

"Certain it is that a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind, and coming to sway the practice, of the world; a law which recognises independence, which frowns upon aggression, which favours the pacific, not the bloody settlement of disputes, which aims at permanent and not temporary adjustments; above all, which recognises, as a tribunal of paramount authority, the general judgment of civilised mankind. It has censured the aggression of France; it will censure, if need arise, the greed of Germany. “Securus judicat orbis terrarum.” It is hard for all nations to go astray. Their ecumenical council sits above the partial passions of those, who are misled by interest, and disturbed by quarrel. The greatest triumph of our time, a triumph in a region loftier than that of electricity and steam, will be the enthronement of this idea of Public Right, as the governing idea of European policy; as the common and precious inheritance of all lands, but superior to the passing opinion of any."

"I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character."

"In London it was not the interests of class which were specially concentrated. It was there that wealth was all-powerful; and wealth has taken desperate offence at their actions during the present year because the Government recommended to Parliament that power in the English army shall no longer be the prize of wealth, but the reward of merit."

"[T]he establishment of freedom of trade and of a general disposition to remove from trade every possible restriction and every possible burden...has been the main agent in raising the commerce of the United Kingdom to that extraordinary position it has now attained. I apprehend that I am stating the matter very moderately if I put it thus, that in the course of the last 30 years our population has increased somewhere about 25 or 30 per cent., while our trade in the same period has increased in the ratio of certainly something not much under 400 per cent."

"Not a drop of blood runs in my veins except Scotch blood, and a large share of my heart ever has belonged, and ever will belong, to Scotland."

"They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life... It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends. (Cheers.) The social problems that confront us are many and formidable. Let the Government labour to its utmost, let the Legislature labour days and nights in your service; but, after the very best has been attained and achieved, the question whether the English father is to be the father of a happy family and the centre of a united home is a question which must depend mainly upon himself. (Cheers.) And those who...promise to the dwellers in towns that every one of them shall have a house and garden in free air, with ample space; those who tell you that there shall be markets for selling at wholesale prices retail quantities—I won't say are imposters, because I have no doubt they are sincere; but I will say they are quacks (cheers); they are deluded and beguiled by a spurious philanthropy, and when they ought to give you substantial, even if they are humble and modest boons, they are endeavouring, perhaps without their own consciousness, to delude you with fanaticism, and offering to you a fruit which, when you attempt to taste it, will prove to be but ashes in your mouths. (Cheers.)"

"The idea of abolishing Income Tax is to me highly attractive, both on other grounds & because it tends to public economy."

"[I]f these islands were to be annexed they would present to us, in the most aggravated form, the difficulty arising from marked differences of race, which occurred already in some of our colonial possessions. Where the superior race was very large in numbers, and the less developed and less civilized race were small, the difficulty was little felt. In Porto Rico, for example, although there was a very large number of negroes—now, happily, no longer slaves—yet the number of Whites was extremely large in comparison, and the slave emancipation had been effected without difficulty. Jamaica was not like Porto Rico. The Whites were very small in number in Jamaica compared with the less developed race."

"[Y]ours is an ancient language, and the language is connected with an ancient history, and it is connected with an ancient music and with an ancient literature. I say that...it is a venerable relic of the past, and there is no greater folly circulating upon the earth, either at this moment or at any other time, than the disposition to under value the past and to break those links which unite the human beings of the present day with the generations that have passed away and have been called to their account. If we wish really to promote the progress of civilization never let us neglect, never let us undervalue, never let us cease to reverence the past. Rely upon it the man who does not worthily estimate his own dead forefathers will himself do very little to add credit or honour to his country... [Y]our laudable and patriotic efforts will come to be more and more understood and regarded by the English people at large, and that prosperity and honour will attend the meetings by which you endeavour to preserve and to commemorate the ancient history, the ancient deeds, and the ancient literature of your country, the Principality of Wales."

"For myself, I said, not in education only but in all things, including education, I prefer voluntary to legal machinery, when the thing can be well done either way."

"Individual servitude, however abject, will not satisfy the Latin Church. The State must also be a slave."

"The history of nations is a melancholy chapter, that is, the history of their Governments. I am sorrowfully of opinion that, though virtue of splendid quality dwells in high regions with individuals, it is chiefly to be found on a large scale with the masses; and the history of nations is one of the most immoral parts of human history."

"A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right."

"The operations of commerce are not confined to the material ends; that there is no more powerful agent in consolidating and in knitting together the amity of nations; and that the great moral purpose of the repression of human passions, and those lusts and appetites which are the great cause of war, is in direct relation with the understanding and application of the science which you desire to propagate."

"[T]he effect of that [Crimean] war was ... to substitute a European conscience, expressed by collective guarantee and the concerted and general action of the European Powers for the sole and individual action of one of them. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of that principle."

"I am delighted to see how many young boys and girls have come forward to obtain honourable marks of recognition on this occasion, — if any effectual good is to be done to them, it must be done by teaching and encouraging them and helping them to help themselves. All the people who pretend to take your own concerns out of your own hands and to do everything for you, I won't say they are imposters; I won't even say they are quacks; but I do say they are mistaken people. The only sound, healthy description of countenancing and assisting these institutions is that which teaches independence and self-exertion... When I say you should help yourselves — and I would encourage every man in every rank of life to rely upon self-help more than on assistance to be got from his neigbours — there is One who helps us all, and without whose help every effort of ours is in vain; and there is nothing that should tend more, and there is nothing that should tend more to make us see the beneficence of God Almighty than to see the beauty as well as the usefulness of these flowers, these plants, and these fruits which He causes the earth to bring forth for our comfort and advantage."

"Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!"

"Let me endeavour, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization vanished from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law. – Yet a government by force can not be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element. – Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind!"

"There is an undoubted and smart rally on behalf of Turkey in the metropolitan press. It is in the main representative of the ideas and opinions of what are called the upper ten thousand. From this body there has never on any occasion within my memory proceeded the impulse that has prompted, and finally achieved, any of the great measures which in the last half century have contributed so much to the fame and happiness of England. They did not emancipate the dissenters, Roman catholics, and Jews. They did not reform the parliament. They did not liberate the negro slave. They did not abolish the corn law. They did not take the taxes off the press. They did not abolish the Irish established church. They did not cheer on the work of Italian freedom and reconstitution. Yet all these things have been done; and done by other agencies than theirs, and despite their opposition."

"There is, in fact, a great deal of resemblance between the system which prevails in Turkey and the old system of negro slavery. In some respects it is less bad than negro slavery, and in other respects a great deal worse. It is worse in this respect, that in the case of negro slavery, at any rate, it was a race of higher capacities ruling over a race of lower capacities; but in the case of this system, it is unfortunately a race of lower capacities which rules over a race of higher capacities."

"Sir, there were other days, when England was the hope of freedom. Wherever in the world a high aspiration was entertained, or a noble blow was struck, it was to England that the eyes of the oppressed were always turned—to this favourite, this darling home of so much privilege and so much happiness, where the people that had built up a noble edifice for themselves would, it was well known, be ready to do what in them lay to secure the benefit of the same inestimable boon for others. You talk to me of the established tradition and policy in regard to Turkey. I appeal to an established tradition, older, wider, nobler far—a tradition not which disregards British interests, but which teaches you to seek the promotion of those interests in obeying the dictates of honour and of justice."

"My opinion is and has long been that the vital principle of the Liberal party, like that of Greek art, is action, and that nothing but action will ever make it worthy of the name of a party."

"You will find, I think, that the predominating idea of Conservatism is the Egyptian principle of repose; but in our Liberal Party we have got the Greek idea of life and motion."

"Nonconformity...still supplies, to so great an extent, the backbone of British Liberalism."

"I feel with a peculiar sympathy all that relates to Scotland. The natives of Scotland, and all those who have Scotch blood in their veins—particularly if, like me, they only have Scotch blood in their veins—are not apt to forget the country from which they sprang. They know its great qualities. They know the solidity of its character."

"Liberty is never safe."

"[T]he argument of unequal capacity does not tell so uniformly against the more numerous classes of the community as might be supposed. Whether from moral causes, or for whatever other reason, the popular judgment, on a certain number of important questions, is more just than that of the higher order."

"As the British Constitution is the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man."

"It is [America] alone who, at a coming time, can, and probably will, wrest from us that commercial primacy. We have no title, I have no inclination, to murmur at the prospect... We have no more title against her than Venice, or Genoa, or Holland, has had against us."

"The English people are not believers in equality; they do not, with the famous Declaration of July 4, 1776, think it to be a self-evident truth that all men are born equal. They hold rather the reverse of that proposition. At any rate, in practice they are what I may call determined inequalitarians; nay, in some cases, even without knowing it. Their natural tendency, from the very base of British society, and through all its strongly-built gradations, is to look upward... The sovereign is the highest height of the system; is, in that system, like Jupiter among the Roman gods, first without a second... It is the wisdom of the British Constitution to lodge the personality of its chief so high that none shall under any circumstances be tempted to vie, or to dream of vying, with it."

"National injustice is the surest road to national downfall."

"The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world."

"I think that the principle of the Conservative Party is jealousy of liberty and of the people, only qualified by fear; but I think the principle of the Liberal Party is trust in the people, only qualified by prudence."

"[T]he great duty of a Government, especially in foreign affairs, is to soothe and tranquillize the minds of the people, not to set up false phantoms of glory which are to delude them into calamity, not to flatter their infirmities by leading them to believe that they are better than the rest of the world, and so to encourage the baleful spirit of domination; but to proceed upon a principle that recognises the sisterhood and equality of nations, the absolute equality of public right among them; above all, to endeavour to produce and to maintain a temper so calm and so deliberate in the public opinion of the country, that none shall be able to disturb it."

"I wish to dissipate, if I can, the idle dreams of those who are always telling you that the strength of England depends, sometimes they say upon its prestige, sometimes they say upon its extending its Empire, or upon what it possesses beyond the seas. Rely upon it the strength of Great Britain and Ireland is within the United Kingdom."

"Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, are as sacred in the eye of Almighty God as are your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope."

"Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home. My second principle of foreign policy is this—that its aim ought to be to preserve to the nations of the world—and especially, were it but for shame, when we recollect the sacred name we bear as Christians, especially to the Christian nations of the world—the blessings of peace. That is my second principle."

"In my opinion the third sound principle is this—to strive to cultivate and maintain, ay, to the very uttermost, what is called the concert of Europe; to keep the Powers of Europe in union together. And why? Because by keeping all in union together you neutralize and fetter and bind up the selfish aims of each. I am not here to flatter either England or any of them. They have selfish aims, as, unfortunately, we in late years have too sadly shown that we too have had selfish aims; but then common action is fatal to selfish aims. Common action means common objects; and the only objects for which you can unite together the Powers of Europe are objects connected with the common good of them all. That, gentlemen, is my third principle of foreign policy."

"My fourth principle is—that you should avoid needless and entangling engagements. You may boast about them, you may brag about them, you may say you are procuring consideration of the country. You may say that an Englishman may now hold up his head among the nations. But what does all this come to, gentlemen? It comes to this, that you are increasing your engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase your engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you abolish strength; you really reduce the empire and do not increase it. You render it less capable of performing its duties; you render it an inheritance less precious to hand on to future generations."

"My fifth principle is...to acknowledge the equal rights of all nations. You may sympathize with one nation more than another. Nay, you must sympathize in certain circumstances with one nation more than another. You sympathize most with those nations, as a rule, with which you have the closest connection in language, in blood, and in religion, or whose circumstances at the time seem to give the strongest claim to sympathy. But in point of right all are equal, and you have no right to set up a system under which one of them is to be placed under moral suspicion or espionage, or to be made the constant subject of invective. If you do that, but especially if you claim for yourself a superiority, a pharisaical superiority over the whole of them, then I say you may talk about your patriotism if you please, but you are a misjudging friend of your country, and in undermining the basis of the esteem and respect of other people for your country you are in reality inflicting the severest injury upon it."

"[My sixth principle is that] the foreign policy of England should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large."

"Of all the principles, gentlemen, of foreign policy which I attach the greatest value is the principle of the equality of nations; because, without recognising that principle, there is no such thing as public right, and without public international right there is no instrument available for settling the transactions of mankind except material force. Consequently, the principle of equality among nations lies, in my opinion, at the very basis and root of a Christian civilisation, and when that principle is compromised or abandoned, with it must depart our hopes of tranquillity and of progress for mankind."

"What did the two words "Liberty and Empire" mean in the Roman mouth? They meant simply this: liberty for ourselves, empire over the rest of mankind."

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer should boldly uphold economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted Chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question of only two or three thousand pounds, he says it is no matter. He is ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called candle-ends and cheese-parings, but he is not worth his salt if he is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of the country. No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who makes his own popularity either his consideration, or any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my opinion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the trusted and confidential steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all that he consents to spend."

"[T]hat Chancellor of the Exchequer is the very man who comes down to corrupt whatever there is of financial virtue in us, and to instil into our minds those seductive and poisonous ideas that it does not, after all, matter very much if there is a deficit, and that it is extremely disagreeable when commerce is not in the most flourishing state to call upon the people to pay. Was that the practice of Sir Robert Peel? ... he came to Parliament and stood at his place in the House of Commons, pointed out the figures as they stood, and said to them—I ask you, will you resort to the "miserable expedient" of tolerating deficit, and of making provision by loans from year to year? That which he denounced as the "miserable expedient" has become the standing law, has become almost the financial gospel of the Government that is now in power."

"The Government of India is the most arduous and perhaps the noblest trust ever undertaken by a nation."

"There was no instalment of Free Trade, which need be taken into our account, before 1842. ... I therefore take 1843 as the first operative year of the first instalment of Liberal legislation under what was called the new Tariff. The second instalment was the new Tariff of 1845. The third instalment was the repeal of the Corn Laws at the opening of 1849, together with the repeal of the Navigation Laws during the Parliamentary Session of that year. The fourth was the new Tariff of 1853, accompanied with the repeal of the Soap Duties and other changes. The fifth and last great instalment was granted by the Customs Act of 1860, which at length gave nearly universal effect to the following principles: 1. That neither on raw produce, nor on food, nor on manufactured goods, should any duty of a protective character be charged. 2. That the sums necessary to be levied for the purposes of revenue in the shape of Customs duty should be raised upon the smallest possible number of articles."

"Whether Protection is a universal poison, or whether it may be conceived to operate as food in cases where it is granted for a few years in order to shelter the first investments in a new industry, I do not now inquire. We at least have never seen or known it in that mitigated form. With us it has sheltered nothing but the most selfish instincts of class against the just demands of the public welfare. These it has supplied with strongholds, from whose portals our producers have too generally marched forth in the day of need, armed from head to foot with power and influence largely gotten at the expense of the community, to do battle with a perverted prowess, against nature, liberty, and justice."

"We must fall back upon the broad, the incorruptible power of national liberty; that we decline to recognise any class whatever, be they peers or be they gentry, be they what you like, as entitled to direct the destinies of this nation against the will of the nation."

"[T]he dispositions which led us to become parties to the arbitration on the Alabama case are still with us the same as ever; that we are not discouraged; that we are not damped in the exercise of these feelings by the fact that we were amerced, and severely amerced, by the sentence of the International Tribunal; and that, although we may think the sentence was harsh in its extent, and unjust in its basis, we regard the fine imposed on this country as dust in the balance compared with the moral value of the example set when these two great nations of England and America—which are among the most fiery and the most jealous in the world with regard to anything that touches national honour—went in peace and concord before a judicial tribunal to dispose of these painful differences, rather than to resort to the arbitrament of the sword."

"As he lived, so he died — all display, without reality or genuineness."

"I am not by any means much pained, but I am much surprised at this rapid development of a national sentiment and party in Egypt. ... ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ is the sentiment to which I should wish to give scope: and could it prevail it would I think be the best, the only good solution of the ‘Egyptian question’."

"Sir, there are three principles, greater than all others, on which, in my opinion, all good finance should be based. The first of them is that there should always be a certainty that whatever the charge may be it can be paid. That, I believe, is of vital importance. The second is that, in times of peace and prosperity, the people of the country should reduce their Debt; and the third point is that they should reduce their Expenditure."

"What is meant by "Boycotting?" In the first place, it is combined intimidation. In the second place, it is combined intimidation made use of for the purpose of destroying the private liberty of choice by fear of ruin and starvation."

"I have had the honour to receive the resolutions passed at the meeting recently held in Willis's Rooms, which your lordship has been good enough to forward to me. I can assure your lordship that the subject of those resolutions is engaging the earnest attention of Her Majesty's Government, who will avail themselves of every opportunity for securing the suppression of slavery and the slave trade."

"What I hope for and desire, what I labour for and have at heart, is to decentralise authority in Ireland. We have disestablished the Church, we have relieved the tenant class of many grievances, and we are now going to produce a state of things which will make the humblest Irishman realise that he is a governing agency and that the government is to be carried on by him and for him."

"Do you suppose that we are ignorant that, in every contested election that has happened since the case of Mr. Bradlaugh came up, you have gained votes and we have lost them? You are perfectly aware of it. We are no less aware of it. But, if you are perfectly aware of it, is not some credit to be given to us who are giving you the same under circumstances rather more difficult — is not some credit to be given to us for presumptive integrity and purity of motive? Sir, the Liberal Party has suffered, and is suffering, on this account. It is not the first time in its history. It is the old story over again. In every controversy that has arisen about the extension of religious toleration, and about the abatement and removal of disqualifications, in every controversy relating to religious toleration and religious disabilities, the Liberal Party has suffered before, and it is now, perhaps, suffering again; and yet it has not been a Party which, upon the whole, has had, during the last half century, the smallest or the feeblest hold upon the affections and approval of the people. Who suffered from the Protestantism of the country? It was that Party — with valuable aid from individuals, but only individuals, who forfeited their popularity on that account — it was that Party who fought the battle of freedom in the case of the great Roman Catholic controversy, when the name of Protestantism was invoked with quite as great effect as the name of Theism is now, and the Petitions poured in quite as freely then as at present. Protestantism stood the shock of the Act of 1829. Then came on the battle of Christianity, and the Christianity of the country was said to be sacrificed by the Liberal Party. There are Gentlemen on the other side of the House who seem to have forgotten all that has occurred, and who are pluming themselves on the admission of Jews into Parliament, as if they had not resisted it with perfect honesty — I make no charge against their honour, and impute no unworthy motive — as if they had not resisted it with quite as much resolution as they are exhibiting on the present occasion. Sir, what I hope is this — that the Liberal Party will not be deterred, by fear or favour, from working steadily onward in the path which it believes to be the path of equity and justice. There is no greater honour to a man than to suffer for what he thinks to be righteous; and there is no greater honour to a Party than to suffer in the endeavour to give effect to the principles which they believe to be just."

"I am convinced that upon every religious, as well as upon every political ground, the true and the wise course is not to deal out religious liberty by halves, by quarters, and by fractions; but to deal it out entire, and to leave no distinction between man and man on the ground of religious differences from one end of the land to the other."

"I must painfully record my opinion that grave injury has been done to religion in many minds — not in instructed minds, but in those which are ill-instructed or partially instructed, which have a large claim on our consideration — in consequence of steps which have, unhappily, been taken. Great mischief has been done in many minds through the resistance offered to the man elected by the constituency of Northampton, which a portion of the community believe to be unjust. When they see the profession of religion and the interests of religion ostensibly associated with what they are deeply convinced is injustice, they are led to questions about religion itself, which they see to be associated with injustice. Unbelief attracts a sympathy which it would not otherwise enjoy; and the upshot is to impair those convictions and that religious faith, the loss of which I believe to be the most inexpressible calamity which can fall either upon a man or upon a nation."

"The reason why the foreign producer gets his produce to market cheaper, relatively, is this — that foreign produce is collected and brought in such large quantities and is sent in great masses to the market. That is the secret of cheap carriage... We must try to make our pounds of produce into tons — or must bring together a number of producers. If you small agriculturists can collectively offer a great bulk of merchandise to the railway companies, they will give you good terms."

"Ideal perfection is not the true basis of English legislation. We look at the attainable; we look at the practicable; and we have too much of English sense to be drawn away by those sanguine delineations of what might possibly be attained in Utopia, from a path which promises to enable us to effect great good for the people of England."

"The right hon. Gentleman quoted repeatedly this declaration...to keep [rebellion] out of Egypt it is necessary to put it down in the Soudan; and that is the task the right hon. Gentleman desires to saddle upon England. Now, I tell hon. Gentlemen this—that that task means the reconquest of the Soudan. I put aside for the moment all questions of climate, of distance, of difficulties, of the enormous charges, and all the frightful loss of life. There is something worse than that involved in the plan of the right hon. Gentleman. It would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. ["No, no!"] Yes; these are people struggling to be free, and they are struggling rightly to be free."

"There is a process of slow modification and development mainly in directions which I view with misgiving. "Tory democracy," the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the Conservative party in which I was bred, than it is like Liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism … applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the old Conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests. The Liberalism of to-day is better … yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they called construction, — that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man. Both the one and the other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years."

"I have even the hope that...the sense of justice which abides tenaciously in the masses will never knowingly join hands with the Fiend of Jingoism."

"[An] Established Clergy will always be a tory Corps d'Armée."

"The rule of our policy is that nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort; and I am not aware that, either in its moral or even its literary aspects, the work of the state for education has as yet proved its superiority to the work of the religious bodies or of philanthropic individuals. Even the economical considerations of materially augmented cost do not appear to be wholly trivial."

"I deeply deplore the oblivion into which public economy has fallen; the prevailing disposition to make a luxury of panics, which multitudes seem to enjoy as they would a sensational novel or a highly seasoned cookery; and the leaning of both parties to socialism, which I radically disapprove."

"Socialism. Here I am at one with you. I have always been opposed to it. It is now taking hold of both parties, in a way I much dislike: & unhappily Lord Salisbury is one of its leaders, with no Lord Hartington (see his speech at Darwen) to oppose him."

"I would tell them of my own intention to keep my counsel...and I will venture to recommend them, as an old Parliamentary hand, to do the same."

"The principle that I am laying down I am not laying down exceptionally for Ireland. It is the very principle upon which, within my recollection, to the immense advantage of the country, we have not only altered, but revolutionized our method of governing the Colonies. ... England tried to pass good laws for the Colonies at that period; but the Colonies said—"We do not want your good laws; we want our own." We admitted the reasonableness of that principle, and it is now coming home to us from across the seas. We have to consider whether it is applicable to the case of Ireland. ... I ask that in our own case we should practise, with firm and fearless hand, what we have so often preached—the doctrine which we have so often inculcated upon others—namely, that the concession of local self-government is not the way to sap or impair, but the way to strengthen and consolidate unity."

"On the side adverse to the Government are found...in profuse abundance, station, title, wealth, social influence, the professions, or the large majority of them—in a word, the spirit and power of class. These are the main body of the opposing host. Nor is that all. As knights of old had squires, so in the great army of class each enrolled soldier has, as a rule, dependents. The adverse host, then, consists of class and the dependents of class. But this formidable army is in the bulk of its constituent parts the same...that has fought in every one of the great political battles of the last 60 years, and has been defeated. We have had great controversies before this great controversy—on free trade, free navigation, public education, religious equality in civil matters, extension of the suffrage to its present basis. On these and many other great issues the classes have fought uniformly on the wrong side, and have uniformly been beaten by a power more difficult to marshal, but resistless when marshalled—by the upright sense of the nation."

"The difference between giving with freedom and dignity on the one side, with acknowledgment and gratitude on the other, and giving under compulsion—giving with disgrace, giving with resentment dogging you at every step of your path—this difference is, in our eyes, fundamental, and this is the main reason not only why we have acted, but why we have acted now. This, if I understand it, is one of the golden moments of our history—one of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return, or, if they return, return at long intervals, and under circumstances which no man can forecast."

"Ireland stands at your bar expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant. Her words are the words of truth and soberness. She asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that oblivion our interest is deeper than even hers. ...She asks also a boon for the future; and that boon for the future, unless we are much mistaken, will be a boon to us in respect of honour, no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity, and peace. Such, Sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill."

"This I must tell you, if we are compelled to go into it—your position against us, the resolute banding of the great, and the rich, and the noble, and I know not who against the true genuine sense of the people compels us to unveil the truth; and I tell you this—that, so far as I can judge, and so far as my knowledge goes, I grieve to say in the presence of distinguished Irishmen that I know of no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man than the making of the Union."

"I will venture to say that upon the one great class of subjects, the largest and the most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice and humanity—upon these, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes."

"For real dangers the people of England and Scotland form perhaps the bravest people in the world. At any rate, there is no people in the world to whom they are prepared to surrender or to whom one would ask them to surrender the palm of bravery. But I am sorry to say there is another aspect of the case, and for imaginary dangers there is no people in the world who in a degree is anything like the English in regard to being the victim of absurd and idle fancies. It is notorious all over the world. The French, we think, are an excitable people; but the French stand by in amazement at the passion of fear and fury into which an Englishman will get him when he is dealing with an imaginary danger."

"They [opponents of Home Rule] say what a dreadful case it will be that after all they predict has come to pass—it never will come to pass—but still, after all that has come to pass, there will be no remedy against Ireland except that of armed force. These gentlemen are extremely shocked at the idea of holding Ireland by armed force. (Laughter.) I want to know how you hold it now? (Prolonged cheering.) I want to know how you held it for these six and eighty years? (A voice. — "Coercison.") You have held it by armed force. Do not conceal from yourselves the fact, do not blind yourselves to the essential features of the cause upon which you have to judge. By force you have held it; by force you are holding it; by love we ask you to hold it. (Loud and prolonged cheering, during which the audience rose and waved their handkerchiefs, and three cheers were asked for and given "for the Grand Old Man.")"

"I affirm that Welsh nationality is as great a reality as English nationality. It may not be as big a reality in that it does not extend over so large a country, but with the traditions and history of Wales, with the language of Wales (hear, hear), with the religion of Wales (cheers), with the feelings of Wales, I maintain that the Welsh nationality is as true as the nationality of Scotland, to which by blood I exclusively belong."

"What is a public meeting? It is not an anarchical combination—it is not a mob—it is an assemblage of rational beings to which, if the invitation be general, every man has a right to go, and the Government reporter has a right to go, but only like others and subject to the ordinary law. But if instead of appealing to the promoters of the meeting...to afford the Government reporter facilities, if instead of that the method of violence is resorted to, then I say the law was broken by the agents of the law. It is idle to speak to the Irish people of the duty of obeying the law, or to bring in Coercion Bills to make them obey the law, if the very Government that so speaks and that brings in these Bills has agents who violate the law by violently breaking up orderly public meetings, and who are sustained by the Ministers of the Crown in this illegal action."

"I have said, and I say again, "Remember Mitchelstown"."

"Public economy is part of public virtue."

"The coercion which has been introduced has not been a coercion against crime...It has been a coercion against combination. And combination—it stands and glares upon us from every page in the history of Ireland—is the only arm by which a poor and destitute and feeble population are able to make good their ground, even in the slightest degree, against the domineering power of the State and of the wealthy with England at their back."

"This Coercion Act professes to be in the main an Act directed against conspiracy, and conspiracy is a bad thing. But under the name of conspiracy we say that it is directed against combination. Combination is not always a very good thing, but combination is very often the sole means by which the weak can protect themselves against the strong, the poor against the wealthy."

"Think, ladies and gentlemen, of your "Men of Harlech". In my judgment, for the purpose of a national air...and without disparagement of old "God save the Queen" or anything else, it is perhaps the finest national air in the world."

"...the principle of nationality and the principle of reverence for antiquity—the principle of what I may call local patriotism—is not only an ennobling thing in itself, but has a great economic value. ... The attachment to your country, the attachment among British subjects to Britain, but also the attachment among Welsh-born people to Wales, has in it, in some degrees, the nature both of an appeal to energy and an incentive to its development, and likewise, no few elements of a moral standard; for the Welshman, go where he may, will be unwilling to disgrace the name. It is a matter of familiar observation that even in the extremest east of Europe, wherever free institutions have supplanted a state of despotic government, the invariable effect has been to administer an enormous stimulus to the industrious activity of the country."

"The Welsh made a very good and a very hard fight against the English in self-defence, and what was the consequence? That the English were obliged to surround your territory with great castles; and the effect of this has been that, as far as I can reckon, more by far than one-half of the great remains of the castles in the whole island south of the Tweed are castles that surround Wales. That shows that Wales was inhabited by men, and by men who valued and were disposed to struggle for their liberties."

"As regards to the sincerity of the Liberal party...I...refer with some confidence to the labours of that party for the last 50 years in setting free both capital and handicraft of all kinds, both from much undue taxation and from restraints devised for the benefit of special interests at the cost of the people at large—labours which have resulted not in a uniform, but in a very general and a very large improvement of the condition of the working community."

"We are servants of the Crown as well as servants of the people... I am not ashamed to say that in my old age I rejoice in any opportunity which enables me to testify that, whatever may be thought of my opinions, whatever may be thought of my proposals in general politics, I do not forget the service which I have borne for so many years to the illustrious representative of the British Monarchy."

"The peculiarity of this strike...has been that a great number of separate trades, which have nothing to do with one another...have shown that they intend to make common cause. You may depend upon it that this is a social fact of the highest importance and of very general importance of the future. I believe that the lesson has been learnt from Ireland, and that it is due to the present Government and to its coercive laws in Ireland, and to the necessity which they have laid upon the people of Ireland in different parts of the country which have no connexion with one another to associate together for an object which they believe to be vital to all. I am much inclined to think that the working men of London have learnt this lesson from Ireland."

"An enlightened impartial observer...will be disposed to think that in the common interests of humanity this remarkable strike and the results of this strike, which have tended somewhat to strengthen the condition of labour in the face of capital, is the record of what we ought to regard as satisfactory, as a real social advance; that it tends to a greater, a more uniform, and a more firm establishment of just relations; that it tends to a fair principle of division of the fruits of industry."

"But let the working man be on his guard against another danger. We live at a time when there is a disposition to think that the Government ought to do this and that and that the Government ought to do everything. There are things which the Government ought to do, I have no doubt. In former periods the Government have neglected much, and possibly even now they neglect something; but there is a danger on the other side. If the Government takes into its hands that which the man ought to do for himself it will inflict upon him greater mischiefs than all the benefits he will have received or all the advantages that would accrue from them. The essence of the whole thing is that the spirit of self-reliance, the spirit of true and genuine manly independence, should be preserved in the minds of the people, in the minds of the masses of the people, in the mind of every member of the class. If he loses his self-denial, if he learns to live in a craven dependence upon wealthier people rather than upon himself, you may depend upon it he incurs mischief for which no compensation can be made."

"The serious disintegration of the Liberal party did not begin in 1886. For a long time the wealthy and the powerful had been detaching themselves from the body of the Liberal party, and finding their most natural associations in Toryism, in stagnation, and in resistance. For many of them it was a perfect godsend when Home Rule turned up and supplied them with a plausible excuse for doing ostensibly or even ostentatiously that which in their hearts they had been longing for an excuse to do."

"We are not to judge individuals hastily on account of social mischiefs, that may be due to them as a body, through their holding of a position inherited from their forefathers, the whole nature of which they have not had strength and depth of wisdom to detect."

"I think we certainly must recognise...how much ground has been lost by the doctrines of free trade within the last 25 years. It is a great and heavy disappointment. I have no doubt that the dreadful militarism which lies like an incubus, like a vampire upon Europe, is responsible for much of the mischief."

"Do not let us conceal from ourselves that this country is almost at the present time the solitary citadel of free trade. ... I confidently anticipate...that these doctrines of free trade will in the long run be found to mean nothing in the world except that each man and each country shall turn to the best account, without artificial interference or interruption, the powers and the gifts which God has given them. This is the sum and substance, the Alpha and the Omega, of our creed."

"I have been a learner all my life, and I am a learner still. ... I have some ideas that may not be thought to furnish good materials for a liberal politician. I do not like changes for their own sake, I only like a change when it is needful to alter something bad into something good, or something which is good into something better. ... [T]he basis of my liberalism is this. It is the lesson which I have been learning ever since I was young. I am a lover of liberty; and that liberty which I value for myself, I value for every human being in proportion to his means and opportunities. That is a basis on which I find it perfectly practicable to work in conjunction with a dislike to unreasoned change and a profound reverence for everything ancient, provided that reverence is deserved."

"All selfishness is the great curse of the human race, and when we have a real sympathy with other people less happy than ourselves that is a good sign of something like a beginning of deliverance from selfishness."

"[T]he practice of thrift is not one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the people of this country. It exists more beyond the border, in Scotland, undoubtedly, than it does in England, but it is increasing, and increasing very much, happily, in England itself. I rejoice to say that it has been in the power of the State to effect this by judicious legislation—not by what is called "grandmotherly legislation", of which I for one have a great deal of suspicion—but by legislation thoroughly sound in principle—namely, that legislation which like your savings bank, helps the people by enabling the people to help themselves."

"I am not slow to claim the name of Scotchman, and undoubtedly, even if I were slow to claim it, there is the fact staring me in the face that not a drop of blood runs in my veins except what is derived from a Scottish ancestry."

"[T]he finances of the country is intimately associated with the liberties of the country. It is a powerful leverage by which English liberty has been gradually acquired. Running back into the depths of antiquities for many centuries, it lies at the root of English liberty, and if the House of Commons can by any possibility lose the power of the control of the grants of public money, depend upon it your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison."

"I name next a word that it requires some courage to utter these days—the word of economy. It is like a echo from the distant period of my early life. The wealth of the country, and the vast comparative diffusion of comfort, has, I am afraid, put public economy, at least in its more rigid and severe forms, sadly out of countenance."

"There ought to be a great effort of the Liberal party to extend the labour representation in Parliament. ... And we affirm that it is among the high and indispensable duties of the party...to proceed to provide for the establishment of district councils and parish councils, and thereby to bring self-government to the very doors of the labouring men throughout the country. Further, I will add boldly that it will be their duty to enact compulsory powers for the purpose of enabling suitable bodies to acquire land upon fair and suitable terms, in order to place the rural population in nearer relations to the land, to the use and profit of the land which they have so long tilled for the benefit of others, but for themselves almost in vain."

"That reform of the land laws, that abolition of the present system of entail, together with just facilities for the transfer of land, is absolutely necessary in order to do anything like common justice to those who inhabit the rural parts of this country, and whom, instead of seeing them, as we now see them, dwindle from one census to another, I, for my part, and I believe you, along with me, would heartily desire to see maintained, not in their present number only, but in increasing numbers over the whole surface of the land."

"It is a lamentable fact if, in the midst of our civilization, and at the close of the nineteenth century, the workhouse is all that can be offered to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and honourable life. I do not enter into the question now in detail. I do not say it is an easy one; I do not say that it will be solved in a moment; but I do say this, that until society is able to offer to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and blameless life something better than the workhouse, society will not have discharged its duties to its poorer members."

"I think I can truly put up all the change that has come into my politics into a sentence; I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty, I learned to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes."

"There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent. "Property is sluggish and inert." Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open."

"Protectionism and militarism are united in an unholy but yet a valid marriage: and the one and the other are in my firm conviction alike the foes of freedom."

"You are told that education, that enlightenment, that leisure, that high station, that political experience are arrayed in the opposing camp, and I am sorry to say that to a large extent I cannot deny it. But though I cannot deny it, I painfully reflect that in almost every one, if not in every one, of the great political controversies of the last 50 years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or whatever subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these wealthy classes, these titled classes, have been in the wrong."

"Let us go forward in the good work we have in hand and let us put our trust, not in squires and peers, and not in titles or in acres; I will go further and say, not in man, as such, but in Almighty God, who is the God of justice, and who has ordained the principle of right, of equity, and of freedom to be the guides and the masters of our lives."

"You are opposed...in your division of Nottingham, on the ground of your having declined to support the Compulsory Eight Hours Bill for all miners, by many miners in your county who desire it. ... The question...is whether the Nottinghamshire miners or a part of them will, for the sake of their eight hours question, elect in preference to you an enemy of the Liberals and of the Irish cause, with which throughout the country the people sympathize. I have long known it as characteristic of the English working class that it knew how to sacrifice its views and apparent interests to some wider and weightier cause. So it was during the American civil war the population of Lancashire cheerfully encountered the cotton famine because they hated slavery and because America was the home of labour."

"The county election was raging. ... I was circulating in the mob as a volunteer (like all the other undergraduates) on the side of Norreys. I held forth to a working man, possibly a forty shilling freeholder, on the established text, reform was revolution. To corroborate my doctrine I said, “Why, look at the revolutions in foreign countries”, meaning of course France and Belgium. The man looked hard at me and said these very words: “Damn all foreign countries: what has old England to do with foreign countries?” This is not the only time when I have received an important lesson from a humble source."

"[I was] a youth in his twenty third year, young of his age, who had seen little or nothing of the world, who resigned himself to politics, but whose desire had been for the ministry of God. The remains of this desire operated unfortunately. They made me tend to glorify in an extravagant manner and degree not only the religious character of the State, which in reality stood low, but also the religious mission of the Conservative party. There was, to my eyes, a certain element of AntiChrist in the Reform Act and that Act was cordially hated. ... It was only under the (second) Government of Sir Robert Peel that I learned how impotent [and] barren was the conservative office for the Church."

"I am vexed to see portions of the labouring class beginning to be corrupted by the semblance of power as the other classes have been tainted & warped by its reality; and I am disgusted by finding a portion of them ready to thrust Ireland, which is so far ahead in claim, entirely into the background. Poor, poor, poor human nature."

"I cannot help regretting that the hon. and gallant Gentleman has felt it his duty to put the question. It is put under circumstances that naturally belong to one of those fluctuations in the condition of trade which, however unfortunate and lamentable they may be, recur from time to time. Undoubtedly I think that questions of this kind, whatever be the intention of the questioner, have a tendency to produce in the minds of people, or to suggest to the people, that these fluctuations can be corrected by the action of the Executive Government. Anything that contributes to such an impression inflicts an injury upon the labouring population."

"George III in his private character shows to advantage when compared with Charles II or George II. But, if George III had succeeded in repressing freedom and parliamentary government, we should have had a Revolution, not probably so bad as the French, but resembling it in kind. From such a catastrophe we were preserved by that unworthy representative of good principles, Wilkes."

"I agree with you that a grave calamity overhangs the Liberal party in connection with the plan which I described to you in two peculiar monosyllabic epithets [mad and drunk]... Liberalism cannot put on the garb of Jingoism without suffering for it... [For sixty years my life has been] a constant effort to do all I could for economy & for peace; not the peace of this country only but of the world... it is not now economy but peace which supplies the key note of the situation... If the thing is to be done at all let it be done by those who think it right."

"I am thankful to have borne a part in the emancipating labours of the last sixty years; but entirely uncertain how, had I now to begin my life, I could face the very different problems of the next sixty years. Of one thing I am, and always have been, convinced—it is not by the State that man can be regenerated, and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with. In some, and some very important, respects, I yearn for the impossible revival of the men and the ideas of my first twenty years, which immediately followed the first Reform Act."

"Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed, or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope."

"[W]hat I call the ‘mad and drunk’ scheme of my colleagues on the naval estimates. ... [T]hat scheme (the most wanton contribution in my view to accursed militarism that has yet been made in any quarter, unless possibly by the Crispian Italy)."

"In 1880, Midlothian leading the way, the nation nobly answered to the call of justice and [br]oadly recognised the brotherhood of man. It was the nation, not the classes."

"I am a Free Trader on moral no less than on economic grounds: for I think human greed and selfishness are interwoven with every thread of the Protective system."

"This means war!"

"I dislike the idea of its [vaccination] being compulsory. I don't like the notion of the State stepping in between parent and child when it is not absolutely necessary. The State is generally a very bad nurse."

"I am not so much afraid either of Democracy or of Science as of the love of money. This seems to me to be a growing evil. Also, there is a danger from the growth of that dreadful military spirit."

"[T]he idea that the colonies add to the strength of the mother country appears to me to be as dark a superstition as any that existed in the Middle Ages."

"To serve Armenia is to serve the Civilization."

"[The publication of The Jubilee of Free Trade is] an act of great gallantry for the Cobdenian faith is in all points at a heavy discount—Peace, Retrenchment, Free Trade and all the rest of it, to my great grief I must confess."

"[W]e do not prosecute the cause we have in hand upon the ground that they are our fellow Christians. This is no crusade against Mahomedanism. ... Nay, I will say it is no declaration of universal condemnation of the Mahomedans of the Turkish Empire. On the contrary...there have been good and generous Mahomedans, who have resisted these misdeeds to the uttermost of their power. ... Although it is true that those persons are Christians on whose behalf we move, I confidently affirm...that if, instead of being Christians, they were themselves Mahomedans, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians—call them what you like—they would have precisely the same claims upon our support, and the motives which brought us here today would be incumbent upon us with the same force and with the same sacredness that we recognize at the present moment. ... The ground on which we stand here is not British nor European, but it is human. Nothing narrower than humanity could pretend for a moment justly to represent it. (Cheers.)"

"Great Assassin."

"I am fundamentally a dead man: one fundamentally a Peel–Cobden man."

"I venture on assuring you that I regard the design formed by you and your friends with sincere interest, and in particular wish well to all the efforts you may make on behalf of individual freedom and independence as opposed to what is termed Collectivism."

"The hopelessness of the Turkish Government should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures. Next to the Ottoman Government nothing can be more deplorable and blameworthy than jealousies between Greek and Slav and plans by the States already existing for appropriating other territory. Why not Macedonia for the Macedonians as well as Bulgaria for the Bulgarians and Serbia for the Serbians?"

"[T]he House of Lords...had inflicted a deadly mutilation on the Parish Councils Bill, they (having also refused our measure on employers' liability) had placed themselves in sharp conflict with public opinion on great subjects. ... I was at Biarritz when this happened in January or February 1894. I suggested dissolution to my colleagues in London. ... But...I was compelled to let the matter drop. ... Thus there was let slip an opportunity in my opinion nothing less than splendid for raising decisively an issue of vital importance to popular government: an opportunity which if rightly used would have given the Liberal party a decisive preponderance for the full term of one or probably two Parliaments, quite apart from the vast public advantages within reach. The great controversy between Lords and Commons, terrible in 1831–32, formidable in 1860–1, happily averted with the Queen's wise aid in 1884...would have reached a practical settlement: and the yet graver controversy...of seven hundred years with Ireland would have come nearer to a complete settlement by a measure of Home Rule."

"In 1834 the Government...did themselves high honour by the new Poor Law Act, which rescued the English peasantry from the total loss of their independence."

"So long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world."

"Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead. I will measure exactly the sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals."

"We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace."

"Nothing, that is morally wrong, can be politically right."

"The best way to see London is from the top of a bus."

"[Money should] fructify in the pockets of the people."

"If there were no Tories, I am afraid he would invent them."

"I can say that, as a working man, I think no man has stronger claims upon my sympathy, support, and affection than Mr. Gladstone. When the election of 1880 came we had him placed at the helm of affairs. Although I was twitted by weak-kneed Liberals and Tories that he would never concede the franchise, my faith in his honesty, in his sense of justice to the people, and in his love for the people, was not in the slightest degree shaken by these jeers. I was perfectly certain that he would enfranchise my class. In taking off this covering to unveil to you the bust of this great statesman I can say, fearless of contradiction, that he lives in the affections of thousands of men, aye, tens of thousands, who dwell in our rural villages in humble cottages, and who, I believe, whenever a wise Providence shall call him aside from this scene of action, will mourn his loss with a great and profound depth of feeling. I do not believe that Mr. Gladstone or any other living being is free from mistakes; but of this I am certain, that whenever he has made a mistake and has found it out, he has been honourable, he has been manly enough to acknowledge it, and has done his best to rectify it."

"Mr. Gladstone once said to me: “If you ever have to form a Government, you must steel your nerves, and act the butcher”: a piece of very sound advice (as I learned from experience)."

"He has — and it is one of the springs of great power — a real faith in the higher parts of human nature; he believes, with all his heart and soul and strength, that there is such a thing as truth; he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."

"Mr. Gladstone's personal popularity was such as has not been seen since the time of Mr. Pitt, and such as may never be seen again. Certainly it will very rarely be seen. A bad speaker is said to have been asked how he got on as a candidate. “Oh,” he answered, “when I do not know what to say, I say ‘Gladstone,’ and then they are sure to cheer, and I have time to think.” In fact, that popularity acted as a guide both to constituencies and to members. The candidates only said they would vote with Mr. Gladstone, and the constituencies only chose those who said so. Even the minority could only be described as anti-Gladstone, just as the majority could only be described as pro-Gladstone."

"Mr. Gladstone [w]as the greatest member of the greatest deliberative assembly which, so far, the world has seen."

"Many of those who figured prominently in the counsels of the Labour party in the twentieth century bore eloquent testimony to the "uplifting power" of Gladstone's "matchless voice and superb vitality", and confessed how "the thrill of his splendid oratory" bound them to the Liberal party in the old man's twilight years. Frederick Rogers, Arthur Henderson, Robert Smillie, and especially George Lansbury, all acknowledged the debt which they owed to Gladstone. "I can hear his voice and see him now," Lansbury wrote in the 1930s after he had retired from the leadership of the Labour party. These enduring emotions suggest that the presence of Gladstone at the head of the Liberal party constituted the principal obstacle to the emergence of a coherent and independent labour movement."

"Gladstone was the political god."

"He was the first major British statesman to consider seriously the implications of the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland, and to realize that if Ireland were indeed an integral part of the United Kingdom, it must be governed on the same principles as the rest; and it was this realization that prepared him to accept the policy of home rule. His importance in the history of Anglo-Irish relations lies less in the measures that he actually carried, far-reaching though they were, than in the immense influence that his concern for Ireland had on British public opinion. It was he, more than anyone else, who made the state of Ireland an issue in British politics."

"Who's the Liberal leader? he Who for us has stood, Stood through triumph and defeat For the people's good; We, the people, have a mind, Well it shall be known, Gladstone, he shall lead us still, He, and he alone. We have votes and let them heed us; Gladstone, he alone shall lead us. Why? because our wrongs he feels And our rights would win; Why? because for us he fights Out of power and in. [...] Voters tell them, they who'll need us, Gladstone, he alone shall lead us."

"Always there was this huge concentration of force; purpose at white heat roared like a furnace in every action of his life. When once he had convinced himself on any subject, it ceased to be his opinion, and became a cosmic truth, which it was the duty of every right-minded person to uphold... he was convinced, and said so, that the will of the English people was set on giving Home Rule to Ireland, and that he was the appointed instrument to accomplish their will for them: God gave him his health and vitality for that. Thus his conscience was invariably clear of personal ambition: he was working not for his own idea but for some great cause external to him. Never, so Mrs. Gladstone told my mother, did the estrangement and execrations of those who had been his friends cause him to say "I wish I had never done it!" He might regret the bitterness he had aroused, but he never regretted those measures which had caused it."

"Among the peoples of that Continent [North America] your personality has become identified with the cause of freedom, and you are to them the embodiment of their highest ideal of the statesman."

"Who is there in the House of Commons who equals him in knowledge of all political questions? who equals him in earnestness? who equals him in eloquence? who equals him in courage and fidelity to his convictions? If these gentlemen who say they will not follow him have any one who is equal, let them show him. If they can point out any statesman who can add dignity and grandeur to the stature of Mr. Gladstone, let them produce him."

"The soul of the country was stirred to its very depths by the marvellous eloquence, the touching pathos, and the burning passion of the great Liberal leader's speeches. I shall not be guilty of exaggeration if I say that the Nonconformists of Great Britain to a man, ay, and a woman, had ranged themselves on his side. They looked upon him as the deliverer of nations, the inspired leader of peoples, as a giant of unsurpassed strength wrestling with and conquering the powers of injustice and oppression. His country was the world; mankind of every colour and creed were his brothers. Not once in many centuries does a nation possess a son who commands such universal and almost inexhaustible admiration as was lavished upon William Ewart Gladstone in those days. I have often felt that at this period many a man would have esteemed it an honour and counted it a happy martyrdom to die for the great Chieftain."

"[H]is [voice] was rich, sonorous and exquisitely modulated in its tones... with the grace and variety of his gesture and the flashing glance of his eye... it was only in watching him as he spoke that one received a due impression of the easy power he showed in dealing with any interruption that came from the audience, or in following up on the spur of the moment some line or argument suggested by expressions of assent or dissent. His readiness was amazing. Those of us who listened to him in Parliament used to think that the short speeches he made on the spur of the moment when some question arose suddenly in debate, revealed the swiftness of his mind and the combative force of his whole nature better than did the more elaborate discourses on which he had reflected beforehand. There was a fire, a passion, a concentrated energy of diction, in these extempore outbursts which roused his followers and cowed his opponents... Indignation there often is—burning indignation at injustice, falsehood or cruelty—but no personal acrimony, no note of malignity or vindictiveness."

"His arguments may be sometimes finedrawn or oversubtle. They are never petty or niggling. He is like an eagle soaring high in the air and seeing the far-off things as well as the near things, and seeing them all in truer relation to one another than the man standing on the ground can see them. In following his thoughts one feels in particular the power he possesses of testing views and proposals by permanent moral standards. To him the ethical values were always the real and final values, and moral principles the true searchlight to be turned on every question."

"He was the first leading Englishman to win for the sufferers in the cause of Italian freedom the sympathy of the Western nations. He was the statesman who brought to a close the differences with America which had arisen out of the Civil War, and made possible a better feeling between the nations than had ever existed before. Little credit was given to him at the time for either of these services, any more than for his action in the Eastern Question. But History will not forget them."

"Free trade, a commercial treaty with France, the abolition of the paper duties, the reduction of expenditure and taxation, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Education Act of 1870, the Ballot Act, the opening of the Universities to Nonconformists and of the Civil Service to competitive examination, Cardwell's Army reforms, the Alabama arbitration and neutrality in the Franco-Prussian War—it was an impressive record, but all well within the canon of accepted Liberal ideas."

"Throughout his life Gladstone felt a passionate sympathy for peoples struggling to achieve national independence. This provides the other foundation of his views on foreign policy. "The powers of self-government", this was his answer alike to the problems of the Balkans and those of Ireland. "Give those people freedom and the benefits of freedom", he said of Turkey's Christian subjects in 1880, "that is the way to make a barrier against despotism. Fortresses may be levelled to the ground; treaties may be trodden under foot—the true barrier against despotism is in the human heart and mind." From this sympathy it followed for Gladstone that all nations should enjoy equality of rights... From this in turn sprang his condemnation of imperialism which proclaimed supremacy, not equality, and in its eagerness for aggrandisement brushed aside the rights of other nations to bring them under alien rule."

"Your life has been grand – the noblest and best I have ever known. It has been an inspiration and a triumph; fruitful in untold benefits to millions of men and women. And indeed I feel that the fitting word is neither condolence nor congratulations, but gratitude; – devout thankfulness that such a man has been given to us, and that he knew so well how to direct and use his gifts to the highest service of humanity."

"His wonderful genius enabled him to make Finance popular; to be understanded of the People. He taught the Country to appreciate its importance. His work was based on the solid rock of a substantial annual Surplus, and on the less easily secured foundation of strict Economy. The Customs Tariff was completely and finally purged. The remaining duties on food were repealed. Commercial relations with other countries were extended. The last remaining Excise duties, other than those on Intoxicants, were abolished... Taxation was placed on a Revenue basis; and was concentrated on a few articles consumed by all classes. In a word, by simplifying taxation and by narrowing its basis, its foundation was strengthened; it was lightened to the Consumer and made less a of a burden on the Taxpayer; less restrictive to Trade and to Industry; cheaper and less vexatious of Collection; more recuperative, and more profitable to the Exchequer."

"[T]he prodigious intensity of his personality is even harder for our debased generation to comprehend. The stupendous physical and intellectual energy, the spiritual and sexual anguish, the high moral seriousness which determined the use of every God-given minutes of his time were astonishing to his contemporaries, but are almost literally inconceivable to us, raised as we are on cynicism and pap... Just thinking about Gladstone is for the modern reader deeply humbling."

"His speeches can still astonish by their social radicalism and sheer moral force."

"An almost spectral kind of phantasm of a man — nothing in him but forms and ceremonies and outside wrappings."

"I too am reading the 2nd volume [of Garvin's Joseph Chamberlain] ... I particularly admire the way Gladstone is treated. The wickedness of the old man, his cunning and treachery, and his determination to get his own way while he has time, are plain to see. I feel my old resentments burn up again as I read."

"[T]hey told me how Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right"

"I even managed to squeeze into the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery when Mr. Gladstone wound up the second reading of the Home Rule Bill. Well do I remember the scene and some of its incidents. The Grand Old Man looked like a great white eagle at once fierce and splendid. His sentences rolled forth majestically and everyone hung upon his lips and gestures, eager to cheer or deride. He was at the climax of a tremendous passage about how the Liberal Party had always carried every cause it had espoused to victory. He made a slip. “And there is no cause,” he exclaimed (Home Rule), “for which the Liberal Party has suffered so much or descended so low.” How the Tories leapt and roared with delight! But Mr. Gladstone, shaking his right hand with fingers spread claw-like, quelled the tumult and resumed, “But we have risen again...”"

"He became the prophet as statesman: the Ayatollah of Victorian Christianity."

"Speech from Gladstone of singular lucidity and power on the Irish question. His manner most earnest. The trend of his mind majestic, penetrating, victorious and irresistible. He is a commander of men. Plain of speech and simple, clear and aggressive. The moral momentum immense. It was a contest. The hearer felt he was witnessing a fight for righteousness, for humanity, for God."

"I have told you before that Gladstone has shown much heart in this business. He has a strong aversion to the waste of money on our armaments. He has much more of our sympathies. He has more in common with you and me than any other man of his power in Britain."

"By far the greatest orator whom I personally heard in the House of Commons—indeed almost the only orator—was Mr. Gladstone... While this great and famous figure was in the House of Commons the House had eyes for no other person. His movements on the bench, restless and eager, his demeanour when on his legs, whether engaged in answering a simple question, expounding an intricate Bill, or thundering in vehement declamation, his dramatic gestures, his deep and rolling voice with its wide compass and marked northern accent, his flashing eye, his almost incredible command of ideas and words, made a combination of irresistible fascination and power. We who sat opposite him in his later years saw in him the likeness, now of an old eagle, fearless in his gaze and still exultant in his strength, now of some winged creature of prey, swooping down upon a defenceless victim, now of a tiger, suddenly aroused from his lair and stalking abroad in his anger. Mr. Gladstone seemed to me to be master of every art of eloquence and rhetoric. He could be passionate or calm, solemn or volatile, lucid or involved, grave or humorous (with a heavy sort of banter), persuasive or denunciatory, pathetic or scornful, at will. It is true that his copiousness was sometimes overpowering and his subtlety at moments almost Satanic."

"[A]s an Irishman I feel that I have a special right to join in paying a tribute to the great Englishman who died yesterday, because the last and, as all men will agree, the most glorious years of his strenuous and splendid life were dominated by the love which he bore to our nation, and by the eager and even passionate desire to serve Ireland and give her liberty and peace. By virtue of the splendid quality of his nature, which seemed to give him perpetual youth, Mr. Gladstone's faith in a cause to which he had once devoted himself never wavered, nor did his enthusiasm grow cold. Difficulties and the weight of advancing years were alike ineffectual to blunt the edge of his purpose, or to daunt his splendid courage, and even when racked with pain, and when the shadow of death was darkening over him, his heart still yearned towards the people of Ireland, and his last public utterance was a message of sympathy for Ireland, and of hope for her future. His was a great and deep nature. He loved the people with a wise and persevering love. His love of the people and his abiding faith in the efficacy of liberty and of government based on the consent of the people, as an instrument of human progress, was not the outcome of youthful enthusiasm, but the deep-rooted growth of long years, and drew its vigour from an almost unparalleled experience of men and of affairs. Above all men I have ever known or read of, in his case the lapse of years seemed to have no influence to narrow his sympathies or to contract his heart. Young men felt old beside him. And to the last no generous cause, no suffering people, appealed to him in vain, and that glorious voice which had so often inspirited the friends of freedom and guided them to victory was to the last at the service of the weak and the oppressed of whatever race or nation. Mr. Gladstone was the greatest Englishman of his time. He loved his own people as much as any Englishman that ever lived. But through communion with the hearts of his own people he acquired that wider and greater gift, the power of understanding and sympathising with other peoples. He entered into their sorrows and felt for their oppressions. And with splendid courage he did not hesitate, even in the case of his much-loved England, to condemn her when he thought she was wronging others, and in so doing he fearlessly faced odium and unpopularity amongst his own people, which it must have been bitter for him to bear; and so he became something far greater than a British statesman, and took a place amidst the greatest leaders of the human race. Amidst the obstructions and the cynicism of a materialistic age he never lost his hold on the "ideal." And so it came to pass that wherever throughout the civilised world a race or nation of men were suffering from oppression, their thoughts turned towards Gladstone, and when that mighty voice was raised in their behalf, Europe and the civilised world listened, and the breathing of new hopes entered into the hearts of men made desperate by long despair."

"Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone—extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic—whether Prime Minister, or Leader of Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying, or scribbling—never a gentleman!"

"Which do you believe most likely to enter an insane convention, a body of English gentlemen honoured by the favour of their Sovereign and the confidence of their fellow-subjects, managing your affairs for five years, I hope with prudence, and not altogether without success, or a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself?"

"Lord Palmerston's "dangerous man" has at length verified that statesman's prophecy of his ultimate insanity."

"What you say about Gladstone is most just. What restlessness! What vanity! And what unhappiness must be his! Easy to say he is mad. It looks like it. My theory about him is unchanged: A ceaseless Tartuffe from the beginning. That sort of man does not get mad at 70."

"I saw in the face of Mr. Gladstone a blending of opposite qualities. There were the peace and gentleness of the lamb, with the strength and determination of the lion. Deep earnestness was expressed in all his features. He began his speech in a tone conciliatory and persuasive. His argument against the bill was based upon statistics which he handled with marvelous facility. He showed that the number of crimes in Ireland for which the Force Bill was claimed as a remedy by the Government was not greater than the great class of crimes in England, and that therefore there was no reason for a Force Bill in one country more than in the other. After marshaling his facts and figures to this point, in a masterly and convincing manner, raising his voice and pointing his finger directly at Mr. Balfour, he exclaimed, in a tone almost menacing and tragic, "What are you fighting for?" The effect was thrilling. His peroration was a splendid appeal to English love of liberty. When he sat down the House was instantly thinned out. There seemed neither in members nor spectators any desire to hear another voice after hearing Mr. Gladstone's."

"At dinner we talked of Newman, whose Dream of Gerontius Gladstone puts very high, so high that he speaks of it in the same breath with the Divina Commedia. At length he asked, "Which of his writings will be read in a hundred years?" "Well," said Henry Smith, "certainly his hymn, 'Lead kindly Light,' and 'The Parting of Friends,' the sermon he preached before leaving Littlemore." "I go further," said Gladstone. "I think all his parochial sermons will be read.""

"W. E. Gladstone used various tactics to unify the party which he led between 1868 and 1894. He consolidated Nonconformist support, for example, by disestablishing the Irish Church and eliminating some of the remaining privileges of the Church of England. Yet free trade was his most persistent theme. He firmly linked the economic case against protectionist tariffs with the liberal ideal of a society of autonomous citizens who were equal in their possession of basic rights."

"To myself, and to many thousands, the assumption by Mr. Gladstone of the leadership of the Liberal party in the House of Commons seemed to promise the inauguration of a new era. It was known that he was as favourable to the revision and enlargement of the representation of the people in Parliament as Palmerston had been opposed to such changes, and the working classes hailed his accession to the Premiership with gladness and hope."

"What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. The Empire now would not have had the Irish Free State giving us so much trouble and pulling us to pieces."

"Gladstone could do in four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do, and he worked sixteen hours a day."

"Last night I met Gladstone — it will always be a memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith and Humphrey Sandwith and Mackenzie Wallace whose great book on Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader — the chief I have always clung to through good report and ill report — because, wise or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic school he hoped we were building as enlisting his warmest sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals, listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a modesty that touched us more than all his power."

"I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the "humanitarianism" of Gladstone than in the purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies of peoples with peoples, the sense of a common humanity between nations, the aspirations of nationalities after freedom and independence, are real political forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them as forces, and Disraeli disowns them that the one has been on the right side, and the other on the wrong in parallel questions such as the upbuilding of Germany or Italy. I think it will be so in this upbuilding of the Sclave."

"The greatest statesman in whose presence I have ever been."

"The talent for which Mr. Gladstone will always be most renowned is that of the orator and debater... He spoke straight from the heart. He was sure that, if his audience knew what he knew, they would feel as he felt, and believe as he believed. Equally if not still more telling was the ardour which he threw into his subject, and the earnestness with which he pleaded his cause. The effect was to kindle extraordinary enthusiasm among those to whom he was addressing himself, to thrill them with emotion, and to hold them spellbound."

"Great though his political courage was, he possessed a courage of a still higher quality—the courage of his convictions. With him right was might. If he had once convinced himself of the rectitude and justice of a particular course, his intrepidity knew no bounds... This strength of conviction, amounting almost to a sense of infallibility, carried with it conviction in others, and constituted one of the principal reasons why he had so great a hold over his fellow-creatures."

"He deplored what he considered to be undue expenditure of public money on armaments... Analogously he had a deep-rooted aversion to annexations of territory. It was...because...he felt that there was a limit to the responsibilities which a government could prudently undertake—that there was a point at which the strength of administration would be overtaxed."

"It was religion that inspired the deepest motives which actuated his conduct. Indeed, it animated his whole life, public as well as private. It was with him a great controlling force and the leading principle of his actions... The truth of Christianity was to him the most assured reality... He had a robust belief in the life and mission of the English Church, regarding her as the most faithful representative of the Church of Christ. He was devoid of bigotry and sectarianism. Wherever the fundamental doctrines of Christianity were conscientiously held, he was ready to express his sympathy with members of all denominations... Few laymen ever studied their Bible with more assiduous and reverent care... The moral teachings of Christianity were not only professed by Mr. Gladstone, but they were practised by him. It was due to this profession, followed by practice, that he displayed such intolerance of wrong and cruelty, such sympathy with the suffering and oppressed, such love for peace and freedom."

"[H]e was unquestionably imbued with high principles; and to high principles he appealed. The furtherance of liberty, toleration, and progress, the amendment of the lot of his fellow-creatures, the relief of suffering, the wise husbanding of the nation's resources—in short, the promotion of better government—were his aims. What he desired most to find in men was character; in measures, equity."

"God bless him! May he be spared to accomplish the great work to which he has put his hand."

"Gladstone's work has made Socialism possible—nay, has been the necessary, the indispensable pioneer of the Socialist movement."

"[I]n the last twenty years England has travelled on the German path... Perhaps nothing shows this change more clearly than that, while there is no lack of sympathetic treatment of Bismarck in contemporary English literature, the name of Gladstone is rarely mentioned by the younger generation without a sneer over his Victorian morality and naive utopianism."

"It seems to me that the best name for this kind of naïve rationalism is rationalist constructivism... If it be thought that by labelling this view 'constructivism' I am once again presenting my opponents with a good word, I should plead that this term was used in precisely this sense already by one of the greatest of the nineteenth-century liberals, W. E. Gladstone. He used it as a name for the attitude for which in the past I had no better term than the 'engineering type of mind'."

"At that time there emerged also in Britain, as the leading figure of the liberal movement, W. E. Gladstone who, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then as liberal Prime Minister, came to be widely regarded as the living embodiment of liberal principles, especially, after Palmerston's death in 1865, with regard to foreign policy, with John Bright as his chief associate. With him also the old association of British liberalism with strong moral and religious views revived."

"[Gladstone] appeared to unite in his person a timeless integrity with modern enlightenment."

"After Mr. Gladstone's death there was found in his own hand the following note: "Rules of Finance: (1) to pay your way; (2) to reduce your debt; (3) to practise economy.""

"The Gladstonian principle may be defined by antithesis to that of Machiavelli, and to that of Bismarck, and to the practice of every Foreign Office. As that practice proceeds on the principle that reasons of State justify everything, so Gladstone proceeded on the principle that reasons of State justify nothing that is not justified already by the human conscience. The statesman is for him a man charged with maintaining not only the material interests but the honour of his country. He is a citizen of the world in that he represents his nation, which is a member of the community of the world. He has to recognize rights and duties, as every representative of every other human organization has to recognize rights and duties. There is no line drawn beyond which human obligations cease. There is no gulf across which the voice of human suffering cannot be heard, beyond which massacre and torture cease to be execrable. Simply as a patriot, again, a man should recognize that a nation may become great not merely by painting the map red, or extending her commerce beyond all precedent, but also as the champion of justice, the succourer of the oppressed, the established home of freedom. From the denunciation of the Opium War, from the exposure of the Neapolitan prisons, to his last appearance on the morrow of the Constantinople massacre this was the message which Gladstone sought to convey. He was before his time. He was not always able to maintain his principle in his own Cabinet, and on his retirement the world appeared to relapse definitely into the older ways."

"When Mr Gladstone visited the North, you well remember when word passed from the newspaper to the workman that it circulated through mines and mills, factories and workshops, and they came out to greet the only British minister who ever gave the English people a right because it was just they should have it...and when he went down the Tyne, all the country heard how twenty miles of banks were lined with people who came to greet him. Men stood in the blaze of chimneys; the roofs of factories were crowded; colliers came up from the mines; women held up their children on the banks that it might be said in after life that they had seen the Chancellor of the People go by. The river was covered like the land. Every man who could ply an oar pulled up to give Mr Gladstone a cheer. When Lord Palmerston went to Bradford the streets were still, and working men imposed silence upon themselves. When Mr Gladstone appeared on the Tyne he heard cheer that no other English minister ever heard...the people were grateful to him, and rough pitmen who never approached a public man before, pressed round his carriage by thousands...and thousands of arms were stretched out at once, to shake hands with Mr Gladstone as one of themselves."

"My profound faith in our great liberal leader, Mr Gladstone, makes me feel all the more secure as to our future. He evidently regards hustings pledges as promises to be faithfully kept and redeemed."

"If you were to put that man on a moor with nothing on but his shirt, he would become whatever he pleased."

"Gladstone is very fascinating—his urbanity extreme—his eye that of a man of genius—& his apparent self-surrender to what he is talking of, without a flaw. He made a great impression on me—greater than anyone I have seen here: tho' 'tis perhaps owing to my naïveté, & unfamiliarity with statesmen."

"In such a world community, he insisted, Britons should view the actions of other nations not so much with jealousy as with understanding. The human family must be judged by the same standards applicable to one's own country... Britons should look upon war in the same way. They should care about what happens to their human brethren on the other side of the lines. They should take to their hearts the real meaning of the universality of human experience and of human dignity. Britain's burden, he said to the women gathered in Foresters' Hall in Dalkeith, was the result of having deluged many a hill and valley with blood. The Zulus were doing no more than would patriotic Britons, defending their own country. In Afghanistan, the Tories' wanton attack had spread wild destruction."

"The Christian theologian, of course, would simply say that Gladstone preached anew the old message of brotherhood, that he sought to give the British a Christian foreign policy. In any case, Gladstone was acutely perceptive of the power of group feeling, for he sought to arouse the response he desired precisely by insisting that all men belonged to the same community. He felt first of all that the group feeling of awakening nationalities must be given expression in self-government, and then that unless these group feelings were expanded to include all of mankind they would inevitably unleash jealousy, pride, envy, passion, and war—as they did... Universalism and inclusiveness was the keynote. He always explained by reference to the large picture, by including all things within an interdependent whole. For this reason, his adversary whether at home or abroad was always that class or that government which was committed to exclusiveness, which denied the unity of mankind."

"I don't object to Gladstone always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that the Almighty put it there."

"Mr. Gladstone was entirely different from any politician I have known. He was much older in years than most of those he acted with, but was the youngest in body, soul and spirit... I can hear his voice and see him now; though nothing that I can write will convey to a reader the tremendous emotional effect of his words...that word alone [‘inspired’] gives the impression that was left on the mind of the eighteen year old boy who was listening to him."

"[F]or years I worshipped at the political shrine of Mr. Gladstone."

"The greatest Chancellor of all time."

"Gladstone had not realised the difficulties of the poor, but Disraeli had. Gladstone could not come down to the level of the common people; that had been his trouble."

"[David Lloyd George] talked of Gladstone, and how he [Lloyd George] had attacked him in his very early days in the House of Commons on the Clergy Discipline Bill... When [Lloyd George] went down to Wales afterwards, & the more proper folk reproached him for his attack on Gladstone, he said: 'I give you the same reply that Cromwell gave, "If I meet the King in battle, I will fire my pistol at him".' [Lloyd George] says that he thinks Gladstone as a Churchman had a fundamental dislike for Dissenters... 'I admire him, but I never liked him', is [Lloyd George]'s qualifying comment always."

"It is my boast that for the first four years of my membership of the House of Commons Gladstone was my leader... Gladstone was the greatest and most vital figure which ever appeared in British politics, and there will be a glorious resurrection for the memory, character, and the achievement and inspiration of that old man. We are suffering today largely from the complete neglect of the doctrines to which he devoted his life – the doctrines of peace."

"He has one gift most dangerous to a spectator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import."

"The man who had led Liberalism for nearly thirty years retired from active life into the strenuous ease which is his idleness... Politics knew him no more. This loss to Liberalism it is impossible adequately to measure. Nor can we at this moment attempt any final judgment on what he has done for Liberalism. Only we can say, that of all the great statesmen of England there is not one who has accomplished as much as he in destroying unjust privileges, in establishing for the people their just rights. Can we say more? Is it possible for a ruler of men to leave behind him a nobler or greater record than this? Perhaps it is only now that the leader is gone that we can see how commanding a place he held in the life of the nation, and how great a loss the cause of progress has suffered from his retirement."

"Mr. Gladstone ... was an absolutely unique personality. His gestures, his astonishing dexterity in debate, his power of stirring the deepest emotions, the impression he conveyed of single-mindedness, of desire to do the right thing and to preserve a good conscience before God, to whose direction he essayed to submit himself, all worked together to render him a great moral and intellectual influence in the House of Commons—a fact of which every member, irrespective of creed or party, was justly proud. I was then—and I am now—no worshipper of men, but the expression “great man,” so often applied to persons of very modest rank in conduct and in abilities, is, in my judgment, pre-eminently applicable to Mr. Gladstone, whose claim to that title, while he was still with us, was acknowledged as unreservedly by his political opponents as by his supporters."

"No body of men have ever been so "un-English" as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone: supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the universe, rather than for rebelling against it."

"In March 1880 he returned for the actual election contest and in crowded halls, uncomfortable, dimly lighted, he held spell-bound the miners and workers who came to hear him with the loyalty of disciples. The image of Gladstone which was then established in the popular mind, as the old man eloquent, the righteous prophet, the friend of liberty and justice, lasted long after his death and was often more potent than the whole array of his gifted colleagues and all the party's nostrums and policies... [I]n 1955 an old lady left her house in Shetland to vote Conservative but returning to her house for her purse saw her father's photograph of Mr. Gladstone and went to the poll to vote for Mr. Grimond."

"I think I may take it for granted that Mr. Gladstone is the greatest English statesman who has appeared during the reign of Queen Victoria. This, indeed, seems to me a statement of fact and not a subject for criticism."

"Respecting Mr. Gladstone (Cheers). What was the use to speak of him on a question of sincerity? (Cheers). Every year of his official life had been marked by a succession of measures – no year being without them – some great, some small, but all aiming at the public good – to the good of the people of this country, and especially of the poorer classes. These measures were not even suggested to him: they were the offspring of his own mind, will and purpose – the free gift from him to his countrymen, unprompted, unsuggested. (Loud cheers) ... Mr. Gladstone seemed to be the first statesman who has come up to the idea of a great modern statesman: ... If we do not stand by him...we shall not easily find another to serve us in the same way. (Loud cheers)."

"Talk of the Liberal party? Why it consists of Mr. G. After him it will disappear & all will be chaos."

"On the afternoon of the first of December [1868], he received at Hawarden the communication from Windsor. “I was standing by him,” says Mr. Evelyn Ashley, “holding his coat on my arm while he in his shirt sleeves was wielding an axe to cut down a tree. Up came a telegraph messenger. He took the telegram, opened it and read it, then handed it to me, speaking only two words, ‘Very significant,’ and at once resumed his work. The message merely stated that General Grey would arrive that evening from Windsor. This of course implied that a mandate was coming from the Queen charging Mr. Gladstone with the formation of his first government... After a few minutes the blows ceased, and Mr. Gladstone resting on the handle of his axe, looked up and with deep earnestness in his voice and with great intensity in his face, exclaimed, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ He then resumed his task, and never said another word till the tree was down.”"

"He often seemed to the observer "possessed." If he had not been a very good man, he would have been a very bad one."

"I said that Mr. Gladstone deserved well of Ireland, adding, “Almost all that has been done for Ireland in my time has been done by Mr. Gladstone—Gladstone plus Fenianism, and plus you.”"

"The men of this generation will be agreed in ranking him as the greatest Member of Parliament that the House of Commons has ever seen."

"Such then he was – a marvel and a portent in every one of his qualities; in his vast intellectual powers, in his indomitable courage, in his incessant energy, in his tremendous physical activity and strength, in the vehemence and fervour of his political passion, in the tenacity and tempest of his purpose he was more like an embodied cyclone rushing tempestuous, irresistible, merciless through his times, than a single and solitary human being. And every man who has seen and known him, whether in love or in hate, can say to himself that never in this world will we look upon his like again."

"Gladstone will soon have it all his own way; and, whenever he gets my place, we shall have strange doings... He is a dangerous man, keep him in Oxford, and he is partially muzzled; but send him elsewhere, and he will run wild."

"[A]s these letters show, the man whom above all others Lord Acton esteemed and revered was Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone, with characteristic humility, always deferred to Lord Acton's judgment in matters historical. On the other hand, Lord Acton, the most hypercritical of men, and the precise opposite of a hero-worshipper, an iconoclast if ever there was one, regarded Mr. Gladstone as the first of English statesmen, living or dead."

"You probably have heard that we have concluded the discussions...on the subject of the tariff. I cannot resist the temptation, if it be only for the satisfaction of my own feelings, of congratulating you most warmly and sincerely, on the distinction which your son has acquired, by the manner in which he has conducted himself throughout those discussions and all others since his appointment to office. At no time in the annals of parliament has there been exhibited a more admirable combination of ability, extensive knowledge, temper and discretion. Your paternal feelings must be gratified in the highest degree by the success which has naturally and justly followed the intellectual exertions of your son, and you must be supremely happy as a father in the reflection that the capacity to make such exertions is combined in his case with such purity of heart and integrity of conduct."

"Once Gladstone at luncheon was indulging in a scathing attack on the rising generation, pouring scorn on their lack of all knowledge of the classics; and in order to illustrate his point and show the lamentable ignorance that now prevailed, he suddenly turned on me. I was thirteen and at Eton, but my knowledge of the classics was nil. He asked me what the quantity was of some syllable in a quotation from Horace. I had never heard of the quotation and had no idea whether it was long or short, but as I was clearly expected to say something I said "long". He thumped the table and cried triumphantly, "That is what everyone says", and I felt like a man who has backed a winner by mistake. Then in his grand manner he continued, "But that is wrong, quite wrong; it is short, not long", and after giving very conclusive reasons for this he proceeded: "Next time you are doing Horace's Odes you will stand up and ask the master whether it is short or long, and when he replies, as he undoubtedly will, that it is long, you will say "No, sir, you are wrong", and you will repeat the reasons I have just given." I could see myself, a pallid youth of thirteen, standing up and laying a trap for the classical master, and then making a muck of the explanation. I could also foresee the quite inevitable result, which would be a sound flogging for impertinence; I never carried out the suggestion."

"Mr Gladstone's long and energetic labours in the cause of Suffering and Oppressed Nationalities show that his grand gifts have not been used exclusively for his own countrymen, but for common humanity."

"Without an effort—so it seemed to me—the great orator held his audience for nearly two hours. I stood so far off that the features were indistinct, but was spellbound by the music and the magnetism of the wonderful voice... I had never heard a speaker like this man. I knew little and cared less of the merits of the case he discussed. I was only conscious of the presence of a great human personality under whose spell I was, and from whom I could in no way escape. The magic of sound was in the wonderful voice, and if the things he said were unintelligible to me, the voice brought with it something of inspiration and of uplifting power."

"The defects of his strength grow on him. All black is very black, all white very white."

"Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time between Ruskin and Mr. G., when Ruskin directly attacked his host as a “leveller.” “You see you think one man is as good as another and all men equally competent to judge aright on political questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.” And straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, “Oh dear, no! I am nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle—the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian,” a confession which Ruskin treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly."

"A game was played (if that is the right phrase) at Hawarden at a visitor's suggestion. Each person had to say what day in past or future he would choose to live, it being stipulated that he should have his present knowledge, and that he should afterwards return to the present existence. Mr. Gladstone said a day in ancient Greece when Athens was in its highest glory. The visitor said he would choose the day of Pentecost. On this Mr. Gladstone seemed rather ashamed and withdrew his former choice, and said he would select "a day with the Lord.""

"He was the first Chancellor of the Exchequer who ever made the Budget interesting. "He talked shop," it was said, "like a tenth muse." He could apply all the resources of a glowing rhetoric to the most prosaic questions of cost and profit; could make beer romantic and sugar serious. He could sweep the widest horizon of the financial future, and yet stoop to bestow the minutest attention on the microcosm of penny stamps and the monetary merits of half-farthings."

"The most distinguished political name in this century has been withdrawn from the roll of the living... What he sought was the achievement of great ideals, and whether they were based upon sound convictions or not, they could have issued from nothing but the greatest and the purest moral aspirations; and he is honoured by his countrymen because through so many years, because through so many vicissitudes and conflicts, they have recognised this one characteristic of his action which has never left it, never ceased to colour it. He will leave behind him, especially to those who have followed with deep interest the history of his later years...the memory of a great Christian statesman, set up necessarily on high, from which the sight of his character, his motives, and his intentions was situated so that it could strike all the world. It will have left a deep and most salutary influence on the political thought and the social thought of the generation in which he lived, and he will be long remembered, not so much for the causes in which he was engaged, or the political projects which he favoured, but as a great example of which history hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian man."

"[T]here was one man who not only united high ability with unparalleled opportunity but also knew how to turn budgets into political triumphs and who stands in history as the greatest English financier of economic liberalism, Gladstone... Gladstonian finance was the finance of the system of 'natural liberty,' laissez-faire, and free trade... [T]he most important thing was to remove fiscal obstructions to private activity. And for this, in turn, it was necessary to keep public expenditure low. Retrenchment was the victorious slogan of the day... Equally important was...to raise the revenue that would still have to be raised in such a way as to deflect economic behaviour as little as possible from what it would have been in the absence of all taxation ('taxation for revenue only'). And since the profit motive and the propensity to save were considered of paramount importance for the economic progress of all classes, this meant in particular that taxation should as little as possible interfere with the net earnings of business... As regards indirect taxes, the principle of least interference was interpreted by Gladstone to mean that taxation should be concentrated on a few important articles, leaving the rest free... Last, but not least, we have the principle of the balanced budget."

"I cannot doubt that the right hon. Gentleman, the champion of free-trade, will ere long become the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought."

"I envy you even that little glimpse of Gladstone which you had when he came to Aberystwyth. I am sure you have no idea what Gladstone meant to me as a Canadian lad back in those historic days. My grandfather...was a stern Presbyterian and an equally stern Liberal, to whom I am sure Gladstone's speeches were almost on a par with the Bible. I was brought up in that atmosphere and have never really got over the early training. In fact, I did not want to get over it for it is a magnificent outlook, rich in its sense of humanity and justice."

"As I stood on Saturday afternoon at Greenwich listening to the glowing word of the grandest orator and statesman of modern times, I felt lifted into a holy region of politics, where Tories cannot corrupt or Jingoes break through and yell."

"[T]he almost universal ‘general impression’ that Gladstonianism is the natural creed of the working man."

"We can all agree that the failure to relieve Gordon was the most discreditable episode in Gladstone's career."

"Sir, I can only tell you that profoundly as I distrust him, and lightly as, on the whole, I value the external qualities of his eloquence, I have never listened to him even for a few minutes without ceasing to marvel at his influence over men. That white-hot face, stern as a Covenanter's, yet mobile as a comedian's; those restless flashing eyes; that wondrous voice, whose richness its northern burr enriches as the tang of the wood brings out the mellowness of a rare old wine; the masterly cadences of his elocution; the vivid energy of his attitudes; the fine animation of his gestures—sir, when I am assailed through eye and ear by this compacted phalanx of assailants, what wonder that the stormed outposts of the senses should spread the contagion of their own surrender through the main encampment of the mind, and that against my judgment, in contempt of my conscience, nay, in defiance of my very will, I should exclaim: "This is indeed the voice of truth and wisdom. This man is honest and sagacious beyond his fellows. He must be believed; he must be obeyed.""

"He speaks to me as if I was a public meeting."

"Poor man he was very clever & full of ideas for the bettering & advancement of the country, always most loyal to me personally, & ready to do anything for the Royal Family, but alas!, I am sure involuntarily, he did at times a good deal of harm. He had a wonderful power of speaking & carrying the masses with him."

"Reading Gladstone's Life. Interesting to note that when, after ten years' political experience, he became convinced that the state had to be an infidel state, and could not be used to promote religious truth—he turned straight away into a laisser-faire democrat holding persistently to the policy of diminishing the function of government and doing nothing but what every individual consented to in advance. Hence, his doctrine of nationalities and, in the end, Irish Home Rule. Add to this genuine alteration of intellectual creed, the heady emotion of feeling himself in accord with crude democracy and, owing to his superlative talent as a revivalist preacher, leading it; and you have the Gladstone of 1869–80. After 1880, he was out of sympathy with the collectivist trend of the newer democracy of town workmen, and became a reactionary, appealing pathetically to the Nonconformist middle-class in terror of the new creed and hating the new apostles. His soul was wrapped up in his own principles—religious and economic—each set in a water-tight compartment; he never realised the new order of ideas. Moreover, he was socially an aristocrat and disliked the parvenu in riches and political power—such as Chamberlain."

"Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below."

"If Gladstone failed to solve the Irish Problem – though he did a good deal to cool it – no politician of my time is in a position to criticise him... He devoted a great deal of time and effort to much-needed institutions – for example opening up the Civil Service to competition in place of patronage: abolishing the system of purchasing Army commissions... The judicial system, at his instance, was dramatically reformed; entrance to our great universities on the basis of university religious tests was ended; he master-minded the great advance in national education with Forster's Education Act – for the first time making elementary education compulsory... He was outraged by Disraeli's Eastern policy – and the Midlothian Campaign, perhaps the greatest series of political speeches in our history, not only transfixed audience after audience, but created a new approach to the problem of the rights of emergent nationalities – it is arguable that no previous or subsequent Prime Minister ever achieved so much in international terms."

"That is the greatest statesman who ever lived and when I grow to be a man, I mean to be a great statesman too."

"The fact is, I believe, that political questions generally presented themselves to his mind as ethical questions of right and wrong, and that he found it at the first blush difficult to realize that an opinion, contrary to his own, could be held without some slight tinge of moral obliquity."

"I think that Mr. Gladstone was the strongest anti-socialist that I have ever known among persons who gave any serious thought to social and political questions. It is quite true, as has been often said, that “we are all socialists up to a certain point”; but Mr. Gladstone fixed that point lower, and was more vehement against those who went above it, than any other politician or official of my acquaintance... His strong belief in Free Trade was only one of the results of his deep-rooted conviction that the Government's interference with the free action of the individual, whether by taxation or otherwise, should be kept at an irreducible minimum. It is, indeed, not too much to say that his conception of Liberalism was the negation of Socialism."

"The essential fact was the extraordinary intensity and vehemence of all his impulses. If we think for a moment of human beings as actuated by an internal force measurable in units of horse-power, and if we take the figure of an ordinary man to be 100, and that of an exceptionally energetic person to be 200, then Mr. Gladstone's horse-power was at least 1,000. And this tremendous force could be turned on in any direction and for any purposes great or small... The various and innumerable motives which impel ordinary men sluggishly and feebly towards their respective aims and objects, were in him fiery swords, driving him with almost irresistible force towards the goal on which for the moment his whole mind was concentrated... [I]t is hardly necessary to add that this intense natural vehemence, thus effectively curbed and guided, was the secret of his ascendancy, and of the unbounded enthusiasm which he kindled in nearly all who knew him, and in many hundreds of thousands who had never seen his face or heard his voice."

"As a man, Mr. Gladstone was in a class by himself. He was an extraordinarily good man, but I think I may have known others as good; his intellectual gifts were wonderful, but for pure intellect I have known others whom I should place as high, if not higher. What differentiated him from the rest of the human race was, first, the combination of these qualities with the stupendous driving power of which I have spoken; second, the stern and effective control which he maintained over this mighty force; and, third, the amazingly serviceable quality of his mind, which was always at his command, always rose to the occasion, and unfailingly supplied him with an endless flow of thoughts, arguments, and words upon any topic under heaven with which he had to deal. There were, perhaps, some spheres of thought in which he did not move easily or freely, but they were such that he very rarely had to concern himself with them; and in quickness of apprehension, and insight into the heart of a difficult matter, provided that it was one that came within his normal field of vision, he was unrivalled."

"I think it might be said that the only two [Departments of State] in whose business he was naturally and genuinely interested were the Treasury and the Board of Trade. As Prime Minister he was...obliged to think about foreign affairs...but this to him was generally task-work, and, except in cases when his generous and laudable interest in the "oppressed nationalities," in Turkey or elsewhere, took effect, his criticism and suggestions were few, and nearly always in the direction of peace, non-intervention, and laissez-faire... I never heard him say a word which showed the slightest interest in the Navy or the Army, except in so far as their cost, which he was always anxious to cut down, affected the Estimates; nor can I remember his ever referring with pride or satisfaction to any British feat of arms, ancient or modern, though he was often eloquent about the "Montene-greens," as he always called them, in their wars with the Turks. If ever there was a statesman who deserved to be called "a man of peace," Mr. Gladstone was that man."

"The ultimate aim of politics is not politics, but the activities which can be practised within the political framework of the State. Therefore an effective statement of these activities — e.g. science, art, religion — is in itself a declaration of ultimate aims around which the political means will crystallise … a society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love."

"Since we are what we are, what shall we be But what we are? We are, we have Six feet and seventy years, to see The light, and then resign it for the grave."

"Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do."

"I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead."

"I simply had to get there."

"There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife."

"When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course."

"I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion."

"History is the ship carrying living memories to the future."

"I say, stamping the words with emphasis, Drink from here energy and only energy"

"Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer, Drinker of horizon’s fluid line; Ear that suspends on a chord The spirit drinking timelessness; Touch, love, all senses..."

"No one Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally. Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man."

"Death to the killers, bringing light to life."

"After the first powerful plain manifesto The black statement of pistons, without more fuss But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station."

"Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entranced Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal."

"Death is another milestone on their way. With laughter on their lips and with winds blowing round them They record simply How this one excelled all others in making driving belts."

"They think how one life hums, revolves and toils, One cog in a golden singing hive..."

"What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away"

"For I had expected always Some brightness to hold in trust, Some final innocence To save from dust"

"Across this dazzling Mediterranean August morning The dolphins write such Ideograms: With power to wake Me prisoned in My human speech They sign: 'I AM!'"

"In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring And only measuring Time, like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament To make them birds upon my singing tree: Time merely drives these lives which do not live As tides push rotten stuff along the shore."

"Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity. But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends."

"At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel."

"Then, in a flush of rose, she woke and her eyes that opened Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned. From her dew of lips, the drop of one word Fell like the first of fountains: murmured 'Darling', upon my ears the song of the first bird. 'My dream becomes my dream,' she said, 'come true. I waken from you to my dream of you.' Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams Poured into each other's arms, like streams."

"I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song."

"What is precious is never to forget The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth; Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light, Nor its grave evening demand for love; Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit."

"Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted in the waving grass And by the streamers of the white cloud And whispers of the wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour."

"More beautiful and soft than any moth With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls, Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air."

"In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds Settle upon the nearest roofs But soon are hid under the loud city."

"Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell Reaching across the landscape of hysteria, To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries And imaged towers against that dying sky, Religion stands, the church blocking the sun."

"A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience. Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience."

"Our single purpose was to walk through snow With faces swung to their prodigious North Like compass iron."

"Extensive whiteness drowned All sense of space. We tramped through Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank."

"What the eye delights in, no longer dictates My greed to enjoy: boys, grass, the fenced-off deer. It leaves those figures that distantly play On the horizon's rim: they sign their peace, in games."

"There was a wood, Habitation of foxes and fleshy burrows, Where I learnt to uncast my childhood, and not alone, I learnt, not alone. There were four hands, four eyes, A third mouth of the dark to kiss. Two people And a third not either: and both double, yet different. I entered with myself. I left with a woman."

"History has tongues Has angels has guns — has saved has praised — Today proclaims Achievements of her exiles long returned Now no more rootless, for whom her printed page Glazes their bruised waste years in one Balancing present sky."

"The laurelled exiles, kneeling to kiss these sands. Number there freedom's friends. One who Within the element of endless summer, Like leaf in amber, petrified by light, Studied the root of action. One in a garret Read books as though he broke up flints."

"One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain Through parks. All were jokes to children. All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants Exposed to a too violent sun."

"Let your ghost follow The young men to the Pole, up Everest, to war: by love, be shot. For the uncreating chaos descends And claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride:"

"Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution."

"Of course, the entire effort is to put myself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on."

"Yet supposing that a bomb should dive Its nose right through this bed, with me upon it? The thought is obscene. Still, there are many To whom my death would only be a name, One figure in a column. The essential is That all the 'I's should remain separate Propped up under flowers, and no one suffer For his neighbour. Then horror is postponed For everyone until it settles on him And drags him to that incommunicable grief Which is all mystery or nothing."

"You drive the landscape like a herd of clouds Moving against your horizontal tower Of steadfast speed. All England lies beneath you like a woman With limbs ravished By one glance carrying all these eyes."

"Deep in the winter plain, two armies Dig their machinery, to destroy each other. Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave On either side, except the dead, and wounded."

"All have become so nervous and so cold That each man hates the cause and distant words Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets."

"The guns spell money's ultimate reason In letters of lead on the spring hillside. But the boy lying dead under the olive trees Was too young and too silly To have been notable to their important eye. He was a better target for a kiss."

"His name never appeared in the papers. The world maintained its traditional wall Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well, Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside."

"Consider his life which was valueless In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files. Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man. Ask. Was so much expenditure justified On the death of one so young and so silly Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?"

"Under the olive trees, from the ground Grows this flower, which is a wound. It is easier to ignore Than the heroes' sunset fire Of death plunged in their willed desire Raging with flags on the world's shore."

"Your heart was loaded with its fate like lead Pressing against the net of flesh: and those Countries that crept back across the boundaries Where you had forced open the arena Of limelit France with your star at the centre, Closed in on you, terrified no longer At the diamond in your head Which cut their lands and killed their men."

"Your quicksilver declaiming eye Had frozen to the stare of a straight line Which only saw goals painted in its beam And made an artificial darkness all around Which thickened into Allies."

"To break out of the chaos of my darkness Into a lucid day is all my will. My words like eyes in night, stare to reach A centre for their light: and my acts thrown To distant places by impatient violence Yet lock together to mould a path of stone Out of my darkness into a lucid day."

"My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre."

"The iron arc of the avoiding journey Curves back upon my weakness at the end; Whether the faint light spark against my face Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight, Centre and circumference are both my weakness."

"My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.'"

"And if this I were destroyed, The image shattered, My perceived, rent world would fly In an explosion of final judgement To the ends of the sky, The colour in the iris of the eye. Opening, my eyes say 'Let there be light', Closing, they shut me in a coffin."

"Here where I lie is the hot pit Crowding on the mind with coal And the will turned against it Only drills new seams of darkness Through the dark-surrounding whole. Our vivid suns of happiness Withered from summer, drop their flowers; Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow Fold on the hands of yesterday In double sorrow."

"I wear your kiss like a feather Laid upon my cheek"

"And then the heart in its white sailing pride Launches among the swans and the stretched lights Laid on the water, as on your cheek The other kiss and my listening Life, waiting for all your life to speak."

"Involved in my own entrails and a crust Turning a pitted surface towards a space, I am a world that watches through a sky And is persuaded by mirrors To regard its being as an external shell, One of a universe of stars and faces."

"The seen and seeing softly mutually strike Their glass barrier that arrests the sight. But the world's being hides in the volcanoes And the foul history pressed into its core; And to myself my being is my childhood And passion and entrails and the roots of senses; I'm pressed into the inside of a mask At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light."

"You stared out of the window on the emptiness Of a world exploding: Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain Blasted sideways by the wind. Every sensation except loneliness Was drained out of your mind By the lack of any motionless object the eye could find. You were a child again Who sees for the first time things happen."

"When you smiled, Everything in the room was shattered; Only you remained whole In frozen wonder, as though you stared At your image in the broken mirror Where it had always been silverly carried."

"All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane."

"All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune Following the donkey`s bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses On the high door of a skull and in some corner Of an irrefrangible eye Some old man memory jumps to a child — Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy."

"Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness."

"Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal — For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum. So blot their maps with slums as big as doom."

"Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Break O break open 'till they break the town And show the children green fields and make their world Run azure on gold sands and let their tongues Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open History is theirs whose language is the sun."

"I am for neither West nor East, but for myself considered as a self — one of the millions who inhabit the earth... If it seems absurd that an individual should set up as a judge between these vast powers, armed with their superhuman instruments of destruction I can reply that the very immensity of the means to destroy proves that judging and being judged does not lie in these forces. For supposing that they achieved their utmost and destroyed our civilization, whoever survived would judge them by a few statements. a few poems, a few témoignages [testimonies] surviving from all the ruins, a few words of those men who saw outside and beyond the means which were used and all the arguments which were marshaled in the service of those means. Thus I could not escape from myself into some social situation of which my existence was a mere product, and my witnessing a willfully distorting instrument. I had to be myself, choose and not be chosen... But to believe that my individual freedom could gain strength from my seeking to identify myself with the "progressive" forces was different from believing that my life must be an instrument of means decided on by political leaders. I came to see that within the struggle for a juster world, there is a further struggle between the individual who cares for long-term values and those who are willing to use any and every means to gain immediate political ends — even good ends. Within even a good social cause, there is a duty to fight for the pre-eminence of individual conscience. The public is necessary, but the private must not be abolished by it; and the individual must not be swallowed up by the concept of the social man."

"The prose method might be described as that where the writer provides a complete description of all those material factors in the environment which condition his characters. The poetic method sees the centre of consciousness as the point where all that is significant in the surrounding world becomes aware and transformed; the prose method requires a description of that world in order to explain the characteristics of the people in it. The hero of the poetic method is Rimbaud; of the prose method, Balzac."

"Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words — that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music — those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism."

"The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other."

"Both Hopkins and Lawrence were religious not just in the ritualistic sense but in the sense of being obsessed with the word — the word made life and truth — with the need to invent a language as direct as religious utterance. Both were poets, but outside the literary fashions of their time. Both felt that among the poets of their time was an absorption in literary manners, fashions and techniques which separated the line of the writing from that of religious truth. Both felt that the modern situation imposed on them the necessity to express truth by means of a different kind of poetic writing from that used in past or present. Both found themselves driven into writing in a way which their contemporaries did not understand or respond to yet was inevitable to each in his pursuit of truth. Here of course there is a difference between Hopkins and Lawrence, because Hopkins in his art was perhaps over-worried, over-conscientious, whereas Lawrence was an instinctive poet who, in his concern for truth, understood little of the problems of poetic form, although he held strong views about them."

"You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated."

"In 1960, Spender was renowned as a figure from the past — a poet of the nineteen-thirties — and his work was deeply out of fashion... Most of us had been told in school that of all the thirties poets Spender was the one whose reputation had been most inflated. He lacked the complexity of Auden, the erudition of Louis MacNeice, the cunning of Cecil Day-Lewis. He was the one who had believed the slogans — "Oh young men oh young comrades" — and, after the war, the one who had recanted most shamefacedly. He was the fairest of fair game..."

"For Stephen Spender, the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was a war of classes, on an international scale; the capitalistic class, backed by international imperialism, against the democratic will of 80 percent of the Spanish people. In 1990, the reality of Latin America is not very different from Spender's Spain. In Latin America, wars are class wars, on one side the oligarchy linked to the military class and the great capital and, on the other, the poor people, the ones who have nothing to lose. Fear of communism in 1936 is still flagrant in 1990. And more absurd, more mediocre."

""But do you really think I'm any good?" a nervous Stephen Spender asked WH Auden, some six weeks after they'd met. "Of course," Auden said. "Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated." Humiliation was Spender's lifetime companion. Few poets have been more savagely reviewed. And none has nurtured a greater sense of inadequacy. This is the man who, having dismissed John Lehmann as a potential lover because he was a "failed version of myself", adds: "but I also regarded myself as a failed version of myself." With Spender, self-deprecation reaches comic extremes of self-abasement."

"Talk to Stephen Spender. He is an intelligent young man [ aged twenty-one ] with wild blue eyes and a bad complexion. He takes his work and poetry with immense seriousness, and talks for hours about whether he is more fitted to be a poet than a novelist. He is not conceited so much as self-preoccupied. He is absolutely determined to become a leading writer. A nice and vital young man whom we both liked ."

"All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time."

"The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment."

"The reasons why the adoption of a system of central planning necessarily produces a totalitarian system are fairly simple. Whoever controls the means must decide which ends they are to serve. As under modern conditions control of economic activity means control of the material means for practically all our ends, it means control over nearly all our activities. The nature of the detailed scale of values which must guide the planning makes it impossible that it should be determined by anything like democratic means. The director of the planned system would have to impose his scale of values, his hierarchy of ends, which, if it is to be sufficient to determine the plan, must include a definite order of rank in which the status of each person is laid down. If the plan is to succeed or the planner to appear successful, the people must be made to believe that the objectives chosen are the right ones. Every criticism of the plan or the ideology underlying it must be treated as sabotage. There can be no freedom of thought, no freedom of the Press, where it is necessary that everything should be governed by a single system of thought. In theory Socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried thought must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism, and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism, the ruthless execution of the principle that 'the whole comes before the individual' and the direction of all members of society by a single will supposed to represent the 'whole'."

"The treatment of the South Tirolese by the Italians, even before the advent of Fascism worse than anything known until then in modern times in any part of Western or Central Europe, has made the population more unwilling than ever to endure it further."

"Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place."

"The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."

"The mechanism by which the interaction of democratic decisions and their implementation by the experts often produces results which nobody has desired is a subject which would deserve much more careful attention than it usually receives."

"Yet, though the French Revolution was so largely inspired by the ideal of the Rule of Law, it is questionable whether it really helped the advance towards that ideal. In its course too many different aspirations gained influence which it was difficult to reconcile with that ideal."

"What all this amounts to, then, is that the Rule of Law requires that administrative discretion in coercive action (i.e., in interfering with the person and property of the private citizen) must always be subject to review by an independent court which is not an instrument of, or even privy to, the aims of current governmental policy; that its review must in all such instances extend to the substance of the administrative act and not merely to the question whether it was infra or ultra vires; and that, if such a court finds that the rights of private citizens have been infringed, it will assess damages just as if the right of this person had been violated by another private citizen. This, in addition to the familiar requirements of generality, equality, and certainty of the law is really the crux of the matter, the decisive point on which it depends whether the Rule of Law prevails or not."

"I believe that the main lesson which our generation has learnt is that we must find a new limit for the activities of government, a limit which leaves ample scope for sensible experimentation but which secures the freedom of the individual as the mainspring of all social and political activity. The whole purpose of these lectures has been to suggest that we can find such a limit if we are willing to revive and develop the ancient ideal of the Rule of Law."

"[Apartheid law in South Africa] appears to be a clear and even extreme instance of that discrimination between different individuals which seems to me to be incompatible with the reign of liberty. The essence of what I said [in The Constitution of Liberty] was really the fact that the laws under which government can use coercion are equal for all responsible adult members of that society. Any kind of discrimination — be it on grounds of religion, political opinion, race, or whatever it is — seems to be incompatible with the idea of freedom under the law. Experience has shown that separate never is equal and cannot be equal."

"Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom."

"What I expect is that inflation will drive the Western countries into a planned economy via price controls. Nobody will dare to stop inflation because to discontinue inflation will inevitably cause extensive unemployment. So assuming inflation stops it will quickly be resumed. People will find they can't live with constantly rising prices and will try to control it by price controls and that of course is the end of the market system and the end of the free political order. So I think it will be via the attempt to regress the effects of a continued inflation that the free market and free institutions will disappear. It may still take ten years, but it doesn't matter much for me because in ten years I hope I shall be dead."

"Perhaps I'm unrealistic. As long as people do not fully realize the danger of inflation, they may well pressure for more inflation as a short-term remedy for evils. Though we may well be driven into more, until people have learned the lesson, but that means that inflation may still do more of a great deal of harm, before it will be cured."

"The sentence, 'stopping the printing presses,' is a figurative expression, because it is being done now by creating credit by the Federal Reserve System. But this is government action — all inflation is ultimately the result of activities which government determines and can control. And all inflations have been stopped in the past by the government stopping creating money, or preventing the central bank from creating more money. May I add just one thing? See, all inflations have been stopped by people who created or believed in a very naive form of the Quantity Theory, and acted on that. It may be wrong, but it is the only adequate theory effective to stop an inflation."

"May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power clearly has lost all title to the name “Liberal”. Certainly no liberal can in future vote “Liberal”."

"I've always doubted that the socialists had a leg to stand on intellectually. They have improved their argument somehow, but once you begin to understand that prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have, the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground. Similarly, the idea [that] you can arrange for distributions of incomes which correspond to some conception of merit or need. If you need prices, including the prices of labor, to direct people to go where they are needed, you cannot have another distribution except the one from the market principle. I think that intellectually there is just nothing left of socialism."

"When will the British public at last learn to understand that there is no salvation for Britain until the special privileges granted to the trade unions by the Trade Disputes Act 1906 are revoked? ... There can indeed be little doubt to a detached observer that the privileges then granted to the trade unions have become the chief source of Britain's economic decline."

"What is at issue is not union membership but compulsory union membership and not the right to strike but the right to compel others to strike. There is no need for any other explanation of why the British economy is decaying and the German highly prosperous. The trade unions, being politically sacrosanct, have been allowed to destroy the British economy, and since even somebody as sympathetic to labour as Lady Wootton has told us that “it is in fact the business of a union to be anti-social”, it is high time that somebody had the courage to eradicate that cancer of the British economy."

"What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud."

"The next time I met Ludwig Wittgenstein was in the spring of 1928 when the economist Dennis Robertson, who was taking me for a walk through the Fellows' Gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly decided to change course because on the top of a little rise he perceived the form of the philosopher draped over a deckchair. He evidently stood rather in awe of him, and he did not wish to disturb him."

"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide."

"I suggested before that the whole of economic history could be rewritten in terms of this gradual suppression of the primitive in­stincts by what we very mistakenly call “artificial” rules. Of course, they are not in the strict sense artificial. Nobody ever invented them. They were not the result of design. The new manners of conduct were not adopted because anybody thought they were better. They were adopted because somebody who acted on them profited from it and his group gained from it, and so these rules, without anybody under­ standing them—that is very important for the later part of my argu­ment—without anybody understanding in what way they benefited their community, gradually came to be generally accepted."

"There can be no doubt that our innate moral emotions and instincts were acquired in the hundreds of thousand years—probably half a million years—in which Homo sapiens lived in small hunting and gathering groups and developed a physiological constitution which governed his innate instincts. These instincts are still very strong in us. Yet civilization developed by our gradually learning cultural rules which were trans­mitted by teaching and which served largely to restrain and suppress some of those natural instincts."

"Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I] … which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed."

"A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise. If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot."

"I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary. This does not mean, however, that in some historical circumstances personal liberty may not have been better protected under an authoritarian than democratic government. (...) More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende. Nor have I heard any sensible person claim that in the principalities of Monaco or Lichtenstein, which I am told are not precisely democratic, personal liberty is smaller than anywhere else!"

"She was a very good-looking woman, and extremely intelligent. But she wasn’t really very female; she had too much of a male intelligence."

"I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as Levantine, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians —basically a lack of honesty in them. If I advise speaking about honesty, I think honesty is really the best expression of what I call the morals of a civilized society. Primitive man lacks a conception of honesty."

"The misconception that costs determined prices prevented economists for a long time from recognizing that it was prices which operated as the indispensable signals telling producers what costs it was worth expending on the production of the various commodities and services, and not the other way around. It was the costs which they had expended which determined the prices of things produced.It was this crucial insight which finally broke through and established itself about a hundred years ago through the so-called marginal revolution in economics.The chief insight gained by modern economists is that the market is essentially an ordering mechanism, growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant. However, the various planners (and not only the planners in the socialist camp) and dirigists have still not yet grasped this."

"The social sciences building at the University of Chicago indeed still bears since it was built 40 years ago on its outside an inscription taken from the famous physicist Lord Kelvin: "When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory." I will admit that that may be true, but it is certainly not scientific to insist on measurement where you don't know what your measurements mean. There are cases where measurements are not relevant. What has done much damage to microeconomics is striving for a pseudo-exactness by imitating methods of the physical sciences which have to deal with what are fundamentally much more simple phenomena. And the assumption that it is possible to ascertain all the relevant particular facts still completely dominates the alternative methods of dealing with our constitutional ignorance, which economists have tried to overcome. This of course, is what has come to be called macroeconomics as distinct from microeconomics."

"It seems to me more and more that the immense efforts which during the great popularity of macroeconomics over the last thirty or forty years have been devoted to it, were largely misspent, and that if we want to be useful in the future we shall have to be content to improve and spread the admittedly limited insights which microeconomics conveys.I believe it is only microeconomics which enables us to understand the crucial functions of the market process: that it enables us to make effective use of information about thousands of facts of which nobody can have full knowledge."

"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free."

"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."

"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."

"Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men."

"Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism... There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense."

"The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born."

"I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it."

"I feared that such a prize, as I believe is true of the activities of some of the great scientific foundations, would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion. This apprehension the selection committee has brilliantly refuted by awarding the prize to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are."

"The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society — as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe."

"My whole concept of economics is based on the idea that we have to explain how prices operate as signals, telling people what they ought to do in particular circumstances. The approach to this problem has been blocked by a cost or labor theory of value, which assumes that prices are determined by the technical conditions of production only. The important question is to explain how the interaction of a great number of people, each possessing only limited knowledge, will bring about an order that could only be achieved by deliberate direction taken by somebody who has the combined knowledge of all these individuals. However, central planning cannot take direct account of particular circumstances of time and place. Additionally, every individual has important bits of information which cannot possibly be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form. In a system in which the knowledge of relevant data is dispersed among millions of agents, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different individuals. Given this context, it is intellectually not satisfactory to attempt to establish causal relations between aggregates or averages in the manner in which the discipline of macroeconomics has attempted to do. Individuals do not make decisions on the basis of partial knowledge of magnitudes such as the total amount of production, or the total quantity of money. Aggregative theorizing leads nowhere."

"I think the basic misconception is to speak of the so-called “best” allocation of resources. What is the best? In common economics it is defined as what would be if we knew everything. Economists operate with the fictitious assumption that all the relevant data is known, but this is totally unrealistic. Nobody knows all the data. What we have is widely dispersed knowledge, which cannot be concentrated in one mind. To call the situation—which would use all the knowledge available—“optimal” is nonsense because it is by definition a non-achievable solution. Our problem is not the full utilization of all knowledge but the best use we can achieve with any known institutional structure. In that sense, some oligopolistic (and even monopolistic situations), represent the best possible utilization of knowledge that we can achieve. Even the action of a monopolist can be extremely beneficial."

"There is no doubt, and in this I agree with Milton Friedman, that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression! So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression. One consequence of this policy was, of course, the fact that confidence was destroyed."

"It seems to me that the future of peaceful international relations and the safety of persons in foreign countries would have been much better served if, after the Iranian Government placed itself outside the community of nations by approving the holding captive of the personnel of the United States embassy, the United States Government had at once sent an ultimatum saying that, unless every single member of the embassy staff were within 48 hours handed over unharmed to representatives of the United States Government at some place outside Iran, bombs would be falling at an increasing rate at the seat of the Iranian Government."

"The newfangled word monetarism means of course no more than the good old “quantity theory of money”, as it was formulated in modern times by the late Professor Irving Fisher and reformulated by Professor Milton Friedman. Of this I said nearly 50 years ago in the first lecture I delivered in this country that “from a practical point of view, it would be one of the worst things which could befall us if the general public should ever again cease to believe in the elementary propositions of the quantity theory”. This was, however, unfortunately brought about by the seductive theories of Lord Keynes. I then said that it was in many respects a crude over-simplification, but the irrefutable chief content is still that inflation is always and everywhere the effect of an excessive supply of money and that it can be cured only by a restriction of its supply."

"The knowledge of facts is widely dispersed. We want to make use of knowledge possessed by millions of individual people, which they can only use if they are fed signals about the general situation. You can't reverse it you can't possibly concentrate this knowledge. The whole order of international cooperation has been built on such a signalling system, where signals tell you about facts which nobody knows concrete in their totality, and I may add such signals you cannot correct - you can not correct signals which inform you about circumstances you don't know."

"Both altruism and solidarity are very strong instincts which guided man in the small group. We were serving known other persons when his efforts were directed to the needs of familiar people. Now we have grown as rich as we are because we have replaced this by a system where we no longer work for the known needs of known other people, and no longer use the known assistance of other people, but where our effort is completely guided by price signals, which for the individual means that I must use my resources for the maximum success of what resources is sacrificed for the purpose, but the justification is not my benefit but in this way I benefit my fellow man most. So it does happen that so far as commercial activities economic activities are concerned we will benefit our fellow man most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain. We are then completely free how to use what we have earned and there of course the desire for being altruistic come in very strongly, but not in the ordering principle of our society."

"I did say in print, in February, 1929 that there was no hope for economic recovery in Europe before American interest rates came down. That wouldn’t be until the American boom collapsed — which was likely to happen within the next few months.And this did, in fact, happen in October 1929. What made me expect this, of course, was one of my main theoretical beliefs — that an inflationary boom cannot be maintained indefinitely. I was sure that a very unstable situation was created by the artificial prolongation of the boom in 1927, when the Federal Reserve tried to stave off a collapse by credit expansion."

"I don’t believe we’re in for a crash now. It's much more likely that government will just conceal the continuation of inflation by price controls. But if anything is worse than an open inflation, it’s a repressed inflation. What you’re likely to get is not a violent deflation but increasing stagnation of productivity."

"If the world as a whole returned to the gold standard there would be such fluctuations in the value of gold that it would very soon prove impractical. Today an international gold standard could only mean that a few countries would maintain a real gold standard. The other countries would hang on to the system through a gold exchange standard — where the currency isn't really redeemable in gold but the government attempts to keep a fixed rate between its currency and gold."

"If a big country like the United States did return to the gold standard, it would start a great deflation. Most likely the government couldn't stick to it for long. They'd switch the policy to some halfway measure like a gold exchange standard."

"The advice I would give is: If you have the courage to do so, don't feel patriotic in monetary matters. Choose the money which helps you best."

"When I look at the world, I sometimes feel that here in Germany one may still be in some sort of lifeboat that can hope to keep afloat when the rest of the world goes bust. German and Switzerland and perhaps Austria and Belgium have the few relatively stable currencies in the world."

"There is no salvation for Britain unless the special privileges granted to the trade unions in 1906 are revoked. The average level of real wages of British workers would undoubtedly be higher, and their chances of finding employment better, if the wages of different occupations were again determined by the market and all limitations on the work an individual is allowed to do were removed."

"It should surprise no one that the lost generation of British economists who had succumbed to the teachings of Lord Keynes should form a panicky mob when a reversal of the policies they had inspired reveals the damage they have done. ... Following their advice has induced a structure of employment that can be maintained only by accelerating inflation but will collapse only when it becomes a gallop and destroys any possibility of a rational use of resources. Nobody has ever claimed that so long as it is necessary to reduce inflation to get out of this vicious circle the effect can be anything but to destroy the particular employments created by past inflation. Only after inflation has been brought to a full stop can the market be expected to guide workers to jobs which can be maintained without accelerating inflation. All those who plead for “mild” inflation and oppose “too much” inflation are merely preparing the ground for a later depression."

"Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement."

"I cannot help but protest in the strongest possible terms against the cartoon on page 3 of your publication of the 30th of December equating the present governments of Poland and Chile. It can only be explained by complete ignorance of the facts or by the systematically promoted socialist calumnies of the present situation in Chile, which I had not expected the F.A.Z. to fall for. I believe that all the participants in the Mont Pelerin Society conference held a few weeks ago in Chile would agree with me that you owe the Chilean government a humble apology for such twisting of the facts. Any Pole lucky enough to escape to Chile could consider himself fortunate."

"The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever."

"What the planning authority would have to know would not be the mere totals but the distinct, peculiar conditions prevailing in each enterprise which affect the information about values transmitted through market prices but would be completely lost in any statistical information about quantities that might reach the authority from time to time."

"There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets."

"A reconsideration of the discussion in which I took an active part more than 40 years ago has left me with a rather depressing view of the somewhat shameful state of what has become an established part of economic science, the subject of 'economic systems'. It appears to me that in this subject political attractiveness has been preserved by the flimsiest of arguments. The kindest thing one can say is that some well-meaning people have allowed themselves to be deceived by the vague and thoughtless language commonly used by specialists in the theory of these issues."

"These morals, or better this moral tradition, is the result of an evolution which occurred parallel to, and yet distinct from both biological evolution on the one hand, and the evolution of our intellect on the other hand."

"On the scale on which [tax cutting] is being tried, I'm a little apprehensive. I'm all for reduction of government expenditures but to anticipate it by reducing the rate of taxation before you have reduced expenditure is a very risky thing to do."

"My life has been dominated by my differences with John Maynard Keynes. That turns almost wholly on the - I believe, false - conviction that there is a simple relationship between aggregate demand for consumer goods and the volume of employment. Keynes was one of the most intelligent people I knew but he understood very little economics. He must not be blamed for his disciples. He knew the danger of inflation."

"[Milton Friedman] believes in an oversimplified quantitative relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. You must leave it to the discretion of the central bank to so adjust the supply of ultimate cash reserves as to keep the price level stable."

"The social product which is now maintaining a human population of this world four or five hundred times as large as that which man could achieve in the natural hunting and gathering stage is owed only to the division of labor, skills, and knowledge. This division could never have been designed or planned, but it arose through and is now maintained by the guiding service of competitive market prices and wages that tell each person where its efforts can make the largest contribution to the total. These self-generating signals, which inform the individuals about the combined efforts of thousands of events of which they can have no direct information, bring about an adaptation of the individual efforts to the unknown. No central direction could achieve this adaptation because the knowledge of all the facts of which the market takes account is spread among thousands and cannot be known to any central authority. It is, of course, impossible to improve signals when one does not know what determines them. Wealth, which social justice would like to distribute as a reward for merit and need, is, therefore, due to the circumstance that the direction of individual efforts is guided by a choice between returns which depends largely on accidental circumstances of time and place and is effected but not conclusively determined by what the individual can know or do. Thus, the wealth which the advocates of social justice want to redistribute would not exist if social justice reigned. Social justice is a fraud, a promise to distribute what one would not have if one followed its bidding. Wealth just would not be there or would rapidly disappear if the ordering by the principles of the market that now guide its production were replaced by some others which would give to each that to which he imagines himself to be entitled."

"We have found a method of creating an order of human co–operation which far exceeds the limits of our knowledge. We are led to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware. We do not know the needs which we satisfy, nor do we know the sources of the things which we get. We stand in an enormous framework into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we have never made and never understood, but which have their reason."

"We do not owe our morals to our intelligence: we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct — the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family — that enabled the groups practising them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others."

"Our morality itself is the result of a process of cultural selection. Those things survive which enable the species to multiply."

"I believe you will be shocked by my stating this so bluntly because we are still guided instinctively by those inherited "natural" emotions. But I think we must recognize that we have become a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society by having learned to disregard those natural instincts and to follow instead certain abstract rules of honesty—rules establishing private property and ultimately codified in the form of private law. It is the rules of property and contract on which the growth of a worldwide, peaceful, and prosperous society was based. All these are traditional rules that evolved by a process of selection, which made those groups who followed the new rules more prosperous than other groups, and which thus came gradually to govern the civilised part of the world. Those communities who adopted the new rules and, in doing so, infringed upon deeply embedded natural feelings became the successful ones, the ones who multiplied because they were more prosperous and were able to attract people from other groups."

"In a sense, we all are socialists. We are still governed by feelings that are based on what was necessary in the small group of known people among whom each had to aim at fulfilling the needs of persons he knew; where he had to collaborate with a definite group of fellows, who were given to him and whom he could not choose, to pursue common purposes. Our instincts still tell us to strive to serve the known needs of known people and that our pleasure in life is derived from the consciousness that we follow a set of common purposes with people whom we know and who share our environment."

"Our whole modern society, based on a far-ranging division of labour, is, however, essentially dependent on two factors that conflict with our natural instincts. The first is the assumption, implicit but not understood, that we can do more good to unknown people if we follow the impersonal signals of the market, which enable us to serve the needs of people whom we do not know and to make use of opportunities and facilities with which we have no direct acquaintance. The second is that for this purpose we can follow our own individual aims with freely chosen associates and are not bound to serve the concrete ends of the group into which we were born."

"I don't know what monetarism is. If monetarism just means a good old-fashioned quantity theory, of course it has not failed. If it means the particular version of Milton Friedman, I think it has because he imagines that he can achieve — ascertain — a clear quantity relationship between a measurable quantity of money and the price level. I don't think that is possible. In fact, just about 40 years ago in the opening sentences of my book, Prices and Production, I wrote that it would be a great misfortune if people ever cease to believe in the quantity theory of money. It would be even worse ever to believe it literally. And that's exactly what Milton Friedman does."

"The human groups have been selected for the effects of their habitual practices, effects of which the individuals were not and could not be aware. Customs are mostly group properties, beneficial only if they are common properties of its individual members but referring to reciprocal action. Morals have not only been designed by man, but man also usually does not understand their reason."

"All the paradigms of culturally evolved institutions, morals, exchange, and money refer to such practices whose benefits transcend the individuals who practice them in the particular instances. The result is that whole groups may be helped by them to expand into what I shall call extended orders, through the effects of practices of which the individuals are not aware. Such practices can lead to the formation of orderly structures far exceeding the perception of those whose actions produce them. They make possible the adaptation of such actions to unknown circumstances and lead to the formation of an indefinitely expansible order which can develop only through group selection, that is, a selection of groups for common attributes possessed by them."

"It is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive."

"And since any inflation, however modest at first, can help employment only so long as it accelerates, adopted as a means of reducing unemployment, it will do so for any length of time only while it accelerates. "Mild" steady inflation cannot help—it can lead only to outright inflation. That inflation at a constant rate soon ceases to have any stimulating effect, and in the end merely leaves us with a backlog of delayed adaptations, is the conclusive argument against the "mild" inflation represented as beneficial even in standard economics textbooks."

"It seems to me that my original plan is right, but I am afraid that I’ve come to the conclusion that politically, it is completely Utopian. Governments will never allow monetary competition, and even bankers do not understand the idea because they have all grown up in the system which is so completely dependent on central banks. So I think we need a roundabout way. After all, in the modern world, currency is no longer the most important money. Credit and credit cards are substitutes. While governments can stop people from issuing money, they can hardly stop them from opening accounts in something unless they introduce a complete system of exchange control. I do not expect that any bank will understand this idea. But I hope that one of the big dealers in raw materials will be prepared to open accounts which will be redeemable in so much of current moneys as are necessary to buy this list of raw materials. Through these accounts he can make his unit—call it the “solid”—the standard unit without it ever being used in circulation. People very soon will begin to keep their accounts in “solids”—the only thing which is trustworthy. Although it’s a thing where many people can compete, most of them will probably choose the same list of raw materials. If one major firm will start this, others will imitate it. So I think we can forget about existing money and existing banks, and gradually open a system of accounts which will displace the government money."

"I don't like criticizing Milton Friedman not only because he is an old friend but because, outside of monetary theory, we are in complete agreement. Our general views on what is desired and what is not are almost identical until we get on to money. But if I told him what I said before, that I very much doubt whether monetary policy has ever done anything good, he would disagree. He personally is convinced that a good monetary policy is a foundation for everything."

"I don't believe that we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, and since we can't take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can't stop."

"Those who suffer from this monopoly should form a libertarian anti-labour union movement of workers directed against what has long become a deceptive farce favouring an elite that has gained dominance in a party wrongly claiming to represent the interest of all workers. Once it is recognized that the unions prevent people from getting jobs, such a movement may readily spread."

"The socialist argument continues despite its many defeats―on the impossibility of economic calculation under collectivism, the fallacious claims for the use of markets under socialism, the incompatibility of liberty and state direction of the economy, and many others. The argument is being won by the new liberals of the late 20th century. But many people still do not understand it. And most on the Left continue to resist it."

"Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content."

"I mean, it became particularly acute because Keynes, against his intentions, had stimulated the development of macroeconomics. And I was convinced that not only his particular conclusions, but the whole foundation of macroeconomics was wrong. So I wanted to demonstrate that we had to return to microeconomics, that this whole prejudice supported by the natural scientists that could deduce anything from measurable magnitudes, the effects of aggregates and averages, came to fascinate me much more. I felt in a way, that the thing which I am now prepared to do, I don’t know as there’s anybody else who can do this particular task. And I rather hoped that what I had done in capital theory would be continued by others. This was a new opening which was much more fascinating. The other would have meant working for a result which I already knew, but had to prove it. Which was very dull. The other thing was an open problem: How does economics really look like when you recognize it as the prototype of a new kind of science of complex phenomena which could not employ the simple model of mechanics or physics, but had to deal with what then I described as mere pattern predictions, certain limited prediction. That was so much more fascinating as an intellectual problem."

"Altruism is an instinct we've inherited from the small society where we knew for whom we work, whom we serve. When you pass from this, as I like to call it, 'concrete society', where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision, it becomes necessary that we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do, but by some abstract symbols. Now, the only symbol which tells us where we can make the best contribution is profit. And in fact by pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be, because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is a condition which makes it possible to produce what I call an extended order, an order which is not determined by our aim, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by an impersonal mechanism which by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which is fully impersonal."

"I am now profoundly convinced of what I had only hinted at before, namely, that the struggle between the advocates of a free society and the advocates of the socialist system is not a moral but an intellectual conflict. Thus socialists have been led by a very peculiar development to revive certain primitive instincts and feelings which in the course of hundreds of years had been practically suppressed by commercial or mercantile morals, which by the middle of the last century had come to govern the world economy."

"Questions about the influence of socialism are increasingly more difficult to answer as the word socialism has so many meanings. The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind."

"You cannot successfully use your technical knowledge unless you are a fairly educated person, and, in particular, have some knowledge of the whole field of the social sciences as well as some knowledge of history and philosophy. Of course real competence in some particular field comes first. Unless you really know your economics or whatever your special field is, you will be simply a fraud. But if you know economics and nothing else, you will be a bane to mankind, good, perhaps, for writing articles for other economists to read, but for nothing else."

"An evil fate befall German efforts to defend the ideal of liberty in general and in the field of economics in particular, with the result that today I am almost the only survivor of a generation that set out in the wake of the First World War to devote all its energies to the preservation of a civilised society, a generation that set itself the task to build a better society in a systematic fashion and to learn to understand, and to some extent defend, a tradition that had civilised the world."

"Life at Cambridge during those war years was to me particularly congenial, and it completed the process of thorough absorption in English life which, from the beginning, I had found very easy. Somehow the whole mood and intellectual atmosphere of the country had at once proved extraordinarily attractive to me, and the conditions of a war in which all my sympathies were with the English greatly speeded up the process of becoming thoroughly at home—much more than in my native Austria from which I had already become somewhat estranged during the conditions of the 1920s. While neither on my early visit to the United States nor during my later stay there or still later in Germany did I feel that I really belonged there, English ways of life seemed so naturally to accord with all my instincts and dispositions that, if it had not been for very special circumstances, I should never have wished to leave the country again. And of all the forms of life, that at one of the colleges of the old universities...still seems to me the most attractive. The evenings at the High Table and the Combinations Room at King's are among the pleasantest recollections of my life, and some of the older men I came then to know well, especially J.H.Clapham, remained, while they lived, dear friends."

"Since only actions aimed at perceived benefit to others were, to Aristotle's mind, morally approved, actions solely for personal gain must be bad. That commercial considerations may not have affected the daily activities of most people does not mean however that over any prolonged period their very lives did not depend on the functioning of a trade that enabled them to buy essentials. That production for gain which Aristotle denounced as unnatural had -- long before his time -- already become the foundation of an extended order far transcending the known needs of other persons."

"Whereas, in fact, specialised students, even after generations of effort, find it exceedingly difficult to explain such matters, and cannot agree on what are the causes or what will be the effects of particular events. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account."

"If craftsmen and blacksmiths were feared for transforming material substance, if traders were feared for transforming such intangible qualities as value, how much more will the banker be feared for the transformations he effects with the most abstract and immaterial of all economic institutions? Thus we reach the climax of the progressive replacement of the perceivable and concrete by abstract concepts shaping rules guiding activity: money and its institutions seem to be beyond the boundary of laudable and understandable physical efforts of creation, in a realm where the comprehension of the concrete ceases and incomprehensible abstractions rule."

"The most important player on Ronald Reagan's economic team is Ronald Reagan. The person most responsible for creating the economic program that came to be known as Reaganomics is Reagan himself. For over twenty years he observed the American economy, read and studied the writings of some of the best economists in the world, including the giants of the free market economy — Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — and he spoke and wrote on the economy, going through the rigorous mental discipline of explaining his thoughts to others. Over the years he made all the key decisions on the economic strategies he finally embraced. He always felt comfortable with his knowledge of the field and he was in command all the way."

"At Chicago, Hayek put aside his more technical economic work for the development of a social and political theory that became in time the most ambitious and complete synthesis to emerge from the ranks of the post-war Right. Among its themes — the overriding significance of the rule of law, the need for social inequality, the function of unreflective tradition, the value of a leisured class — were many cultivated by Strauss across the campus. Neither thinker, however, ever referred to the other. Did temperamental antagonism, or intellectual indifference, dictate the silence? Whatever the case, latent tensions of outlook between them were to find expression in due course. Schmitt, on the other hand, was never far from Hayek's mind – standing for the prime example of a skilled jurist whose sophistry helped to destroy the rule of law in Germany, yet a political theorist whose stark definitions of the nature of sovereignty and the logic of party, at any rate, had to be accepted."

"Oakeshott, whose technical theory afforded no space for the nation-state, since collective solidarity was not a principle of civil association, had – as might be expected – nothing to say about the problems of a supra-national one. Asked his view of Britain’s entry into the EEC in the early sixties, Noel Annan reports, he replied: 'I do not find it necessary to hold opinions on such matters.' Hayek, on the other hand, held firm and far-seeing ones. As early as 1939, he argued in his prophetic essay "The Economic Conditions of Inter-State Federalism" that transcendence of national sovereignty in a supra-national framework should be of natural advantage to a free economy, since the higher the plane on which its structural parameters were set – that is, the remoter from local faction and interest – the more insulated they would be from popular passion. In other words: the less immediately democratic the machinery of decision, the safer it was likely to be for the reproduction of capital. Of course, this was less a logical deduction than an empirical wager – that the task of constructing a supra-national popular sovereignty, capable of determining the social path of a supra-national economy, would prove impossible. That calculation has yet to be confounded, as the terms of union agreed at Maastricht – a central monetary authority for Europe, without any commensurate elected assembly – show."

"There was from the beginning a third vision of what European integration should mean, distinct from either federalist or inter-governmentalist conceptions of the Community. Its far-sighted theorist was Hayek, who even before the Second World War had envisaged a constitutional structure raised sufficiently high above the nations composing it to exclude the danger of any popular sovereignty below impinging on it. In the nation-state, electorates were perpetually subject to dirigiste and redistributive temptations, encroaching on the rights of property in the name of democracy. But once heterogeneous populations were assembled in an inter-state federation, as he called it, they would not be able to re-create the united will that was prone to such ruinous interventions. Under an impartial authority, beyond the reach of political ignorance or envy, the spontaneous order of a market economy could finally unfold without interference [...] With the abrupt deterioration in the global economic climate in the 1970s, and the general neo-liberal turn that followed in the 1980s, Hayekian doctrine was rediscovered throughout the West. The leading edge of the change came in the UK and US, with the arrival of Thatcher and Reagan. Continental Europe never produced comparably radical regimes, but the ideological atmosphere shifted steadily in the same direction. The collapse of the Soviet bloc sealed the transformation of working assumptions. By the 1990s, the Commission was openly committed to privatisation as a principle, pressed without embarrassment on candidate countries along with other democratic niceties. Its most powerful arm had become the Competition Directorate, striking out at public sector monopolies in Western and Eastern Europe alike. In Frankfurt the Central Bank conformed perfectly with Hayek’s prewar prescriptions. What was originally the least prominent strand in the weave of European integration had become the dominant pattern. Federalism stymied, inter-governmentalism corroded, what had emerged was neither the rudiments of a European democracy controlled by its citizens, nor the formation of a European directory guided by its powers, but a vast zone of increasingly unbound market exchange, much closer to a European ‘catallaxy’ as Hayek had conceived it."

"[Estonian Prime Minister] Mart Laar came to my office the other day to recount his country's remarkable transformation. He described a nation of people wh are harder-working, more virtuous — yes, more virtuous, because the market punishes immorality — and more hopeful about the future than they've ever been in their history. I asked Mr. Laar where his government got the idea for these reforms. Do you know what he replied? He said, "We read Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek"."

"Yes. I read that paper carefully a few years ago and think it is incoherent because he stresses the idea people can only know their local thing. He doesn’t ever answer why the system’s price conveys the correct global information. In the Walras/Pareto story you do wind up with the correct information—subject to the appropriate assumptions—but Hayek doesn’t like that story. There are cases in game theory where local connections can actually cause a faster diffusion of ideas, and a faster convergence to Nash equilibrium than reactions to the population as a whole, but that’s not in Hayek."

"People sometimes say that they don’t know what they think until they’ve said it, you know. But mind you, even as a graduate student, I’ve never thought that utility theory implies consciousness. Of course you discover things and learn about your own preferences. This is a point that I haven’t explored and that I probably should study more. It seems especially important from the point of view of innovation. By the way, what has always bothered me about Hayek is that all this local knowledge has to be transmitted before the process of social interaction can generate any new knowledge, but he doesn’t show us how that is going to happen."

"Right after we published our first findings, we started getting letters from all over the country saying, "You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics" … I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises as the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true."

"As the title of his 1941 book indicates, the theory of capital lay at the heart of his theory of the cycle. The reason is that he attributes the cycle not to changes in aggregate demand, or even to changes in the quantity of capital, but to changes in the structure of production and hence the structure of the capital stock. In this, his theory was highly unusual: one of the reasons for his failure to engage more effectively with Keynes was the latter’s inability to see how the theory of capital could be of any importance for the cycle. Because the theory of capital is so central, and because it is so complex, it needs to be explained carefully. After that, the rest of his theory falls into place comparatively easily."

"F. A. Hayek, probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period would not quite agree with Smith's notions of what is natural, but his defense of capitalism is indirect by reference to its linkage with liberty, and he explicitly rejected the idea that a legitimating concept of justice is relevant to the operations of a market system."

"It may not be amiss to seen in my calculations of comparative productivity [between entrepreneurial economics and communist economies] verification of a prescient forecast [made by Hayek in 1935 in his essay "The Present State of the Debate".]."

"There were many Hayeks: Hayek, the political scientist; Hayek, the economist; Hayek, the philosopher of social science; Hayek, the psychologist. Even in these different roles, he played many parts."

"Why did his interest in the concept of spontaneous order and the history of the doctrine of unintended social consequences undergo very little development after the 1960s? All of his political writings are in fact amazingly repetitious, exploring a small number of big themes which, however, are not further refined or extended in new contexts. As organizing concepts, they held, I am convinced, enormous potentialities but nevertheless Hayek himself failed to realize them."

"Hayek’s research programme is grounded in the teaching of Adam Smith and Carl Menger, who sought to understand social order not as the result of conscious design, but as the unintended consequences of individual human action. In addition to the emphasis on spontaneous order, Hayek learned from Menger that individual human action is guided by the subjective valuations of individuals, and that the relevant valuation that individuals make is on the marginal unit of the good or service that is the object of deliberation. Throughout Hayek’s career the puzzle of how a social system can transform the individual subjective perceptions of some into useful information for others so they may co-ordinate their actions to produce an overall social order which yields benefits far greater than any individual in the system intended was at the centre of his research efforts."

"Hayek’s reasons for holding that planning cannot work are not limited to the problem that the information required for the task of coordinating the plans of a multitude of individuals is too vast to organize effectively. The knowledge utilized within the market by entrepreneurs does not exist outside that local context and thus cannot even be organized in principle. It is not that planners would face a complex computational task; it is that they face an impossible task, because the knowledge required is not accessible to them no matter what technological developments may come along to ease the computational burden."

"I did not call him "Fritz." To me he remained always "Professor Hayek," despite his own graciousness in treating me as a peer. I shall not attempt to evaluate Professor Hayek's monumental contribution to our understanding of the events of this turbulent century, to the influence of his ideas on these events themselves or even to the development of economic theory in a strictly scientific sense."

"In some of their implicit modeling of political behavior aimed at furthering special group or class interests, the Marxists seemed to be closet associates of public choice, even as they rejected methodological individualism. But how was the basic Marxist critique of politics, as observed, to be transformed into the idealized politics of the benevolent and omniscient superstate? This question was simply left glaringly unanswered. And the debates of the 1930s were considered by confused economists of the time to have been won by the socialists rather than by their opponents, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both sides, to an extent, neglected the relevance of incentives in motivating human action, including political action."

"I did fully learn from Hayek the distinction between what I later called moral community and moral order and moral anarchy – this is about the sense that our genetic predisposition is all for the insider tribe."

"An essential difference between Hayek and Friedman here was that Hayek was in many ways a dark thinker. If you read Hayek in the 1930s and 1940s, the thinks the world is coming apart. Certainly Hayek's response to the Great Depression was not one that imbued with a great deal of optimism. He thought that to a certain extent you just have to wait things out; if you try to intervene to solve the problem you'll only exacerbate it. Whereas Friedman was this tremendous optimist. Friedman was always emphasizing--he said that what Hayek and Robbins got wrong when they were responding to the Great Depression was precisely that: that they said you shouldn't do anything. He thought that part of what he was doing in monetary theory was to try to come up with a way to say that there was a solution, something that could be done that would prevent this kind of problem. A kind of counternarrative to Keynes. And he always emphasized--instead of dwelling on the catastrophic situation that the world was in, he always emphasized the ways in which those catastrophes could be solved by the market. And so when you reach this moment of deep pessimism that I think a lot of people associated with organizations like the Tea Party felt, Hayek in many ways feels more consonant with that set of views."

"Hayek was no opponent of theory; indeed, he frequently defended it from its historicist detractors. But he also understood the limitations of theory."

"I grant that there is one big defect in the neoclassical approach to imperfect knowledge. But it is a defect that Austrians almost never mention! The problem: Do the probabilities that people assign fit the facts? At least as researchers, most economists assume that beliefs about the world are on average correct. But empirically, this is often not so. Flying is much safer statistically than driving, but many people refuse to accept the fact. A large field known as behavioral economics documents such biases. Or to take more policy-relevant beliefs: Basic economics shows us the benefits of free trade, but few non-economists recognize them. I have a series of papers on systematically biased beliefs about economics that explores this topic. Now what is Prof. Boettke going to tell you? I suspect that he is going to say that merely focusing on people’s erroneous beliefs “makes me an Austrian." I call this the “Hayek said the sky is blue" tactic. If you say the sky is blue, that makes you an Austrian because Hayek defended the sky-is-blue thesis back in the 30s. Hayek talked a bit about mistaken beliefs; therefore anyone who ventures within a thousand intellectual miles of this topic is a “Hayekian.” This is ridiculous. By this standard not only does Hayek get credit for ideas that he did not anticipate; he gets credit for ideas that preceded his birth! Hayek made some contributions here - though frankly he was very repetitious. But he did little to advance modern rational expectations theorizing, and even less to anticipate its empirical weaknesses. Would I have done any better? Probably not, but if I hadn’t done a lot more I wouldn’t want my posthumous admirers showering me with undeserved credit. (Well, maybe I would, but I wouldn’t deserve it)."

"I've long since lost all patience with Hayek. His original, true ideas could have been five good blog posts, his errors and bizarre obsessions are numerous, and his writing style insults every person who ever tried to write a decent sentence."

"In fact, a large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent or to reduce transaction costs so that individuals can negotiate freely and we can take advantage of that diffused knowledge of which Friedrich Hayek has told us."

"I will be discussing what happened in economics in England, but these were times when, to a very considerable extent, this was what happened in economics. The first episode I will discuss is local, but the economists involved were among the best in the world. In February 1931, Friedrich Hayek gave a series of public lectures entitled 'Prices and Production' at the London School of Economics … They were undoubtably the most successful set of public lectures given at LSE during my time there, even surpassing the brilliant lectures Jacob Viner gave on international trade theory. The audience, notwithstanding the difficulties of understanding Hayek, was enthralled. What was said seemed to us of great importance and made us see things of which we had previously been unaware. After hearing these lectures, we knew why there was a depression. Most students of economics at LSE and many members of the staff became Hayekians or, at any rate, incorporated elements of Hayek's approach in their own thinking. With the arrogance of youth, I myself expounded the Hayekian analysis to the faculty and students at Columbia University in the fall of 1931."

"For all his brilliance, Hayek didn’t — at the critical time — have a good enough understanding of the dangers of deflation. He didn’t fully realize the extent of sticky wages and prices and, more deeply, he didn’t see that ongoing deflation would render the “calculation problem” of a market economy more difficult. Hayek stressed that a market calculates value in a way that a central planner cannot — but lying behind this ability to calculate is some basic macroeconomic stability. At the key moments, Hayek did not offer the proper recipe for that stability."

"The basic problem is that there are three Hayeks:the--absolutely brilliant--price-system-as-information-aggregator Hayek. the--absolutely bonkers--business-cycle "liquidationist" Hayek. the--absolutely wrong--social-democracy-is-evil Hayek.The first was a genius. The second was a moron--his could never make his arguments cohere either conceptually or empirically, but he kept doubling down on them and wound up in infinite reputational bankruptcy. The third was wrong--I would say blinded ex ante by ideology, others would say proved wrong ex post by events.The problem is that the modern-day Hayekians are by-and-large uninterested in the good Hayek (1), and interested only in the bad Hayeks (2) and (3)..."

"Hayek says that the problem with classical liberalism was that it was not pure enough. The government needed to restrict itself to establishing the rule of law and to using antitrust to break up monopolies. It was the overreach of the government beyond those limits, via central banking and social democracy, that caused all the trouble. A democratic government needs to limit itself to rule of law and antitrust–and perhaps soup kitchens and shelters. And what if democracy turns out not to produce a government that limits itself to those activities? Then, Hayek says, so much the worse for democracy. A Pinochet is then called for to, in a Lykourgan moment, minimalize the state. After social democracy has been leveled and the rubble cleared away, then–perhaps–a limited range of issues can be discussed and debated by a–limited–restored democracy, with some kind of group of right-wing army officers descended from latifundistas Council of Guardians in the background to ensure that property remains sacred and protected, and the government small enough to fit in a bathtub. […] Hayek was formed in Austria. From his perspective the property and enterprise respecting Imperial Habsburg government of Franz Josef eager to make no waves, to hold what it has, and to keep the lid off the pressure cooker appears not unattractive. This is especially so when you contrasted would be really existing authoritarian alternatives: anti-Semitic populist demagogue mayors of Vienna; nationalist Serbian or Croatian politicians interested in maintaining popular legitimacy by waging class war or ethnic war; separatists who seek independence and then one man, one vote, one time. An “authoritarian” after the manner of Franz Josef looks quite attractive in this context–and if you convince yourself but they are as dedicated to small government neoliberalism as you are, and that the Lykourgan moment of the form will be followed by soft rule and popular assent, so much the better. And if the popular assent is not forthcoming? Then Hayek can blame the socialists, and say it is their fault for not understanding how good a deal they are offered."

"Hayek and Marx are similar in their research programs concerning the dynamics of capitalism, its cycles, and the way in which money is vital to capitalism. They both worked a long time to master the problem, but failed to arrive at a neat solution. Hence they both abandoned the program and went on to other, more urgent, concerns. But along the way, they both left a trail of great insights and unsettled debates."

"The human mind, Hayek says, is not just limited in its ability to synthesize a vast array of concrete facts, it is also limited in its ability to give a deductively sound ground to ethics. Here is where the tension develops, for he also wants to give a reasoned moral defense of the free market. He is an intellectual skeptic who wants to give political philosophy a secure intellectual foundation. It is thus not too surprising that what results is confused and contradictory."

"Hayek gave the best exposition ever of the unpopular ideas of economic freedom that somehow triumph anyway, alleviating far more national and global poverty than more fashionable Scandinavia-envy and grandiose plans to "make poverty history.""

"Hayek did not talk about it at the time, but his warnings about the drift toward top-down planning were perhaps most relevant of all in the so-called Third World. It is the misfortune of the field called development economics that it was born at the moment of maximum doubt about individual liberty. As a result, economists conceived of development from the beginning—and to a frightening extent still do today—as a top-down process run by development experts operating on a blank slate."

"Nor does his book offer any real historical setting for Hayek's career. Although often naive in his political judgments, Hayek was intensely concerned with public issues throughout his life. Yet we learn virtually nothing of the development of his views on the affairs of the day. What did he make, for example, of the Dollfuss dictatorship in Austria, where his teacher Ludwig von Mises served its clerical predecessor under Monsignor Seipel, and where Hayek himself planned to return in the 1930s? Mr Ebenstein never even mentions these conservative authoritarian regimes of the period. In later years, he records Hayek's efforts to secure South Tyrol for Austria once again; his organisation of the Mont Pelerin Society, an influential post-war group of free-market intellectuals; his recommendation that West Germany, France and Britain sue for entry as states into the United States; his reception in Verwoerd's South Africa and his admiration for General Pinochet's achievements in Chile; his wish that Iran be bombed in 1979 and Argentina in 1982. Homages from Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Yegor Gaidar roll past (the only discordant note comes from Ayn Rand, once Alan Greenspan's muse: "As an example of our most pernicious enemy, I would name Hayek. That one is real poison."; or again: "The kind who do more good to the communist cause than ours"). Yet no coherent picture of Hayek's political commitments ever emerges, still less their relation to such important works as “The Constitution of Liberty” (1960)."

"The great theme of his remarkable explorations in intellectual history is the danger of all constructivism, the belief that we can deliberately design social arrangements which will be better than those we unwittingly hit upon. Paradoxically, however, the drive of Hayek's own work is itself characteristically that of a rationalist construction. Admiring David Hume and detesting Auguste Comte, his genius was to marry the sceptical insights of the one to more than a touch of the compulsive rigour of the other."

"The investigation of this problem — How is spontaneous order possible? — is sometimes referred to as the 'Hayek programme'."

"I think that permanence and stability are the cardinal virtues of the legal rules that make private innovation and public progress possible. To my mind there is no doubt that a legal regime that embraced private property and freedom of contract is the only one that in practice can offer that permanence and stability … In reaching this conclusion, I have been heavily influenced by the work of Friedrich Hayek."

"Though Hayek clearly allows for the possibility of a retreat from socialism, whether of the hot (command planning) or cold (welfare state) variety, and planning, Hayek’s critics, apparently taking Hayek at his word, use 'inevitability' to refer to the outcome (a totalitarian polity) that, according to Hayek, is supposedly generated by the cumulative logic inherent to interventionist policy and welfare state practices. Though taking care to note that a change in policy may occur, Hayek apparently considers the logic of intervention as primarily nudging policy in one direction, necessitating ever-further government intervention."

"Hayek frequently argued that any failure to adequately mend our ways—abandon “our” supposed infatuation with “social justice” and other “high ideals”—would inexorably put us in the hands of the devil. Arguably, “we”—Obama and company clearly included—have yet to change our ways."

"Much as Hayek’s penchant for claiming that "bad" interventionist policy will ineluctably drive us along the road to serfdom—ultimately culminating in full-blown command planning and political tyranny— is clearly apparent in his 1940s writings, the very same sentiments pervade the third part of The Constitution of Liberty."

"Hayek was never blind to the potential difficulties inherent in this political synthesis, nor dismissive of the serious criticisms of capitalist society and liberal theory presented by thinkers of the left. He explicitly disavowed the ideal of laissez faire and distanced himself from the sort of free market utopianism common among more extreme libertarians. He thought it foolish to pretend that capitalism always rewards those who work the hardest or are otherwise deserving, advocated a minimal social safety net for those incapable of supporting themselves in the market, and had no objection to government taking on tasks far beyond those defining the "minimal state" of Nozick’s libertarianism, so long as this did not result in monopoly and private firms were allowed to compete with government for provision of the services in question. Like Marx, he believed that liberal capitalist society has a tendency to produce alienation, insofar as the impersonal rules of conduct upon which it rests necessarily eschew any reference to a common social end or purpose, and thus cannot satisfy the deepest human yearnings for solidarity. Unlike Marx, he also thought we nevertheless simply have no alternative to capitalism if we want to maintain the level of individual autonomy and material prosperity that are the most prized characteristics of modernity, and that it is naive and dangerous to pretend otherwise."

"What of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their battles against government control of the economy? Here Hayek surprises. He does not disapprove of Reagan and Thatcher, but he has no high opinion of modem politicians in general. He does, however, say that Reagan's and Thatcher's policies "are as reasonable as we can expect at this time. They are modest in their ambitions." Modesty. The capacity to understand that well-meaning politicians — and their advisers, the intellectuals — will only wreak mischief if they try to guide economic development: This antipolitical concept is at the heart of Hayek's theory of economic and social development."

"There was someone who is clearly very important who also was not a member of the scientific commission, but whose career and trajectory was ultimately very important for the definition of contemporary neo-liberalism. This is the Austrian von Hayek. He came from Austria and from neo-liberalism; he emigrated at the time of, or just before, the Anschluss. He went to England and also to the United States. He was very clearly one of the inspirations of contemporary American liberalism, or of American anarcho-capitalism if you like, and he returned to Germany in 1962 where he was appointed professor at Freiburg, thus closing the circle."

"I’ve always thought, incidentally, that many of us should welcome the fact that...a particular policy idea we hold does have this adverse effect on the opinions of other people. I think this is a very good thing, because it means that those of us who hold our views have to be better to get recognized than people who hold the other views. And in the long run, what matters is the quality of people who propose the ideas and not their number and not their position. It is because it is the quality of these ideas that matters so much that Hayek’s ideas have been so wide-spread and have had such an influence, and that you are now seeing the rise in the scientific as well as in the other parts of the world of more people of this particular kind of persuasion.... ... I am one of those who has learned a great deal from Hayek. I hope he is as effective as I think he will be in his teaching in Germany, but I also hope that we will see him back here very often indeed."

"Friedrich Hayek's influence has been tremendous. His work is incorporated in the body of technical economic theory; has had a major influence on economic history, political philosophy and political science; has affected students of the law, of scientific methodology, and even of psychology."

"Over the years, I have again and again asked fellow believers in a free society how they managed to escape the contagion of their collectivist intellectual environment. No name has been mentioned more often as the source of enlightenment and understanding than Friedrich Hayek's … I, like the others, owe him a great debt … his powerful mind … his lucid and always principled exposition have helped to broaden and deepen my understanding of the meaning and the requisites of a free society."

"In terms of his personal characteristics, Hayek was a very complicated personality. He was by no means a simple person. He was very outgoing in one sense but at the same time very private. He did not like criticism, but he never showed that he didn’t like criticism. His attitude under criticism, as I found, was to say: "Well, that’s a very interesting thing. At the moment, I’m busy, but I’ll write to you about it more later." And then he never would! On the other hand, he wasn’t like von Mises. He wasn’t intolerant at all. You cannot conceive of Hayek doing the kind of thing that Mises did, when, for example, he wouldn’t talk to Machlup for three years because Machlup had come out for floating exchange rates at a Mont Pelerin meeting. Hayek did not do that. That was, I believe, because of the influence of the London School on him. He was very much tempered by the London School."

"Let me emphasize. I am an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics. That, again, is subject to misunderstanding. It depends on what you mean by economics. I’m not talking about his understanding of economics, his application of economics to the real world, or anything like that, but his contributions to the science of economics, not to economic practice, not to anything else. I think Prices and Production was a very flawed book. I think his capital theory book is unreadable. I cannot say I’ve read it. [laughter] It’s very unreadable. On the other hand, The Road to Serfdom is one of the great books of our time. His writings in [political theory] are magnificent, and I have nothing but great admiration for them. I really believe that he found his right vocation—his right specialization—with The Road to Serfdom. His earlier works were intended to be part of the literature of technical economics as a science, and, indeed, it was that characteristic of them that impressed Lionel Robbins and led Lionel to bring him from Austria to London. I never could understand why they were so impressed [at the London School of Economics] with the lectures that ended up as Prices and Production, and I still can’t.... these very confused notions of periods of production, different orders of products, and so on."

"There is no figure who had more of an influence, no person had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union."

"The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation — Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive."

"Sixty-two years ago I spent a year in what is known at Harvard as the other Cambridge. It was then in the high pulse of the Keynesian Revolution. Economic discussion was constant, intense, but London also called; once a week I came up to seminars here at the London School of Economics. A major attraction was Friedrich von Hayek, the noted conservative, author of A Road to Serfdom, his widely read analysis of the disastrous but emerging welfare state. He, however, was only slightly heard. The two hours were given over, all but exclusively, to telling him he was wrong. I found myself in support of this correction; it was education by the rebuke of error. (I trust that will not be the tendency on this pleasant and, for me, nostalgic occasion.) Over the years I’ve often presented myself to ardent conservatives as a student of von Hayek; it has added in an agreeable way to their normal confusion."

"Hayek's greatest failure is his neglect of the problem of private power. All his efforts go into the denunciation of state power, but he has little to say about private coercion."

"Hayek's attempt to delegitimize one side of the Western tradition is one of the most significant ideological closures in his work. It prevents him from seeing the close ties which exist between liberalism and socialism."

"Hayek’s lasting achievement was to focus attention on the limited and fragmented nature of knowledge in modern societies and the need for social and economic theorists to make that the cornerstone of their thinking. Yet in some ways he remained trapped in the rationalism he was so keen to reject. If our reason is so feeble, and if knowledge is necessarily imperfect and dispersed, how do we know this to be true? To make that claim Hayek has to take up the privileged status of observer that he is so critical of in constructivist rationalism. If he were not prepared to do so he could not justify his project of social and economic theory at all. Despite his denunciation of the ills of scientism and constructivism, Hayek is closer to the rationalism he criticizes than he might like to acknowledge."

"Hayek was an acute social theorist, but also an ideologue. He developed one of the most sophisticated theories of markets in social science, but he was also a market fundamentalist with a deep-rooted distrust of all forms of state regulation and state intervention, which tended to become more pronounced as he grew older. […] The paradox of Hayek's work however is that he stopped short of advocating either the kind of anarcho capitalism sought by some libertarians, or even the strict minimal state proposed by Robert Nozick. On the contrary he thought that the state needed to retain very strong powers to police the market order and prevent powerful interest groups such as trade unions from subverting it. But he fretted constantly about how this might be achieved, and how democratic governments could be persuaded to cease interfering with markets."

"Hayek's theory of knowledge is his greatest achievement, and offers insights that should be utilised by both right and left, but he failed to apply them to one of the central aspects of the modern era - the way science and technology are utilised in increasingly perverse ways by a deregulated neo-liberal market economy, which if not checked will have devastating consequences for the biosphere and the survival of the human species. It is an example of how his market fundamentalism blinds him to conclusions to which his own analysis of markets should have led him. If he had followed the logic of his own argument, he might have arrived at a rather different view of the appropriate balance between the state and the market, and provided a more searching account of the nature and limits of government action, or as Keynes would have put it, between the agenda and the non-agenda of government. The resources for doing so are there within Hayek's thought, which remains a seminal contribution to modern social theory, but he chose not to develop his ideas in this direction because of his ideological commitment to market fundamentalism. That should not prevent others from doing so. It is increasingly urgent that we should."

"Friedrich A. von Hayek, one of the strongest, and at times one of the few, economic voices advocating the reduction of government's role in the economy, is finally finding himself in the position of a Cassandra who suddenly that discovers people are listening."

"Hayek's work composes a system of ideas, fully as ambitious as the systems of Mill and Marx, but far less vulnerable to criticism than theirs because it is grounded on a philosophically defensible view of the scope and limits of human reason."

"No-one who knows Hayek's work can doubt that his attempt to restate liberal principles in a form appropriate to the circumstances and temper of the twentieth century has yielded a body of insights wholly comparable in profundity and power with those of his forebears in the classical liberal tradition."

"Conservative ideologues have used Smith's insight--that market exchange produces an order in human affairs that no one has designed--to defend their free-market policies. Chief among them was F.A. Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist who became one of the gurus of the intellectual right in the '80s. Hayek argued that the market evolves as an unintended consequence of human activity, claiming that it embodies wisdom inaccessible to any single generation and insisting that it must therefore be accepted as the basis of society. In a devastating critique of Hayek's views, Rothschild dissects the multiple ambiguities of his notion of social order and shows how removed it is from anything in Smith. Hayek believed that we must submit to the unfathomable workings of the market, but this blinkered reverence for social process was unacceptable to Smith, who viewed the market as a human construction."

"I still see Hayek as the best critic of all forms of centralized economic planning. It is to his merit to have shown scientifically that centralized planning cannot work for an economy because complete knowledge of that economy is never available centrally. As nice as it would be to have one, there is no mastermind who knows and can control everything, and there never will be. This was Hayek's scientific argument for the superiority of the market economy. A planned economy is only a viable means where there is a clear overarching goal – during wartime. A war economy is always a planned economy. Supporters of central economic dreams should therefore hear it once and for all: centralized economic planning is not suitable during peacetime."

"He who states that markets cannot fail, that market failure is always the result of government intervention, is a dogmatist. How the hell would he know? Overall, Hayek was not a dogmatist, although in his writings there can be found traces of such a liberal utopianism. There we encounter the motto: "What is not supposed to be, must not be! And what must not be, is not!" To me, all isms are suspicious anyway. The sceptic in me asks: why should markets be more reasonable than other human institutions? And we can see it every day: markets are also imperfect, prone to error, and in need of repair, like everything else that man has created."

"Hayek watched the interwar collapse with horror, as Keynes did, and shared many of Keynes’s liberal values. What he failed to understand is that these values cannot be renewed by applying any formula or doctrine, or by trying to construct an ideal liberal regime in which freedom is insulated from the contingencies of politics."

"Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944), also written during the war, was too pessimistic, I believe, about the capability of present-day capitalism in most Western countries to adjust to maladjustments in the structure of production without causing intolerable unemployment. Excessive pessimism also appears in Hayek’s later writings. In Full Employment at Any Price? (1975), for example, he refers to the inflationary excesses of the 1970s as “the present crisis,” I do not wish to minimize the dangers of inflation. However, the experience of the 1980s bothin the United States and Europe shows that inflation can be stopped without producing more than relatively mild recessions."

"At the time of his death, F.A. Hayek (1899–1992) was unquestionably the world’s preeminent spokesman for classical liberalism and its most important thinker. He led an immensely productive life, over the course of which he made significant contributions to a variety of disciplines, among them economics, political and social theory, psychology, and the history of ideas."

"There were two explanations, and one is that in Hayek and Friedman you had an absolutely marvelous cast—two people, one very bouncy and saucy and cheeky and outspoken, vigorous. This is Friedman. He was always bouncing out with ideas; sometimes they were a bit farfetched. Then you had Hayek, this very correct and rather serious, portly, gracious, slow, rather ponderous-speaking, sometimes thinking what his next sentence is going to be. And they were men unruled by any ambition, not trying to create a party, to get elected, to win votes—any of that. It was an amazing success of upright men of integrity, intellectual brilliance, not flashy, but very impressive to watch them performing over a wide range of topics."

"It was from Hayek that I began."

"Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs."

"I did not begin from Keynes: I began from Pareto, and Hayek (footnote 10: There is evidence for this, in the paper 'Equilibrium and the Cycle')"

"If Hayek believes that the spending of newly-printed currency on employment and consumption will worsen our current terrible depression, then Hayek is a nut."

"The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam."

"I am in full agreement, also, with Dr. Hayek's rebuttal of John Stuart Mill's well-known dictum that "there cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money," which he expresses admirably in the following passage from his last lecture: "it means also that the task of monetary theory is a much wider one than is commonly assumed; that its task is nothing less than to cover a second time the whole field which is treated by pure theory under the assumption of barter, and to investigate what changes in the conclusions of pure theory are made necessary by the introduction of indirect exchange. The first step towards a solution of this problem is to release monetary theory from the bonds which a too narrow conception of its task has created.""

"Hayek's mature appreciation of a society built on the foundations of individual rights, the rule of law, and limited government can thus be traced directly to his own extension of the subjectivism of the Austrian tradition in economics. It must be emphasized that the economic understanding of markets which emerges from the Austrian tradition differs sharply from the understanding of markets which informs the minimal-statist position of many mainstream economists."

"I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics."

"Hayek was one of the most significant intellectuals of the twentieth century, but though he was extremely important for people in Western countries, he was not sufficiently appreciated and recognized there. I remember being in "his" Austria in November 1989, one day before the Velvet Revolution in my country, and hearing at the University of Linz that "Hayek is dead in Austria." I reacted by saying that we would bring him back to life in Prague again. I dare argue that Hayek was more important for us in the East than for people in the West. Westerners did see a real danger in Communism, but did not see that they were beginning the path down their own Hayekian "slippery road." They often considered his views overplayed and exaggerated. For us, Hayek was our guru, our teacher, our lighthouse, our compass in the depressing era of Communism. It was easier for Hayek to capture our hearts... Two decades after Hayek´s death history is on the move again. State interventionism is back and growing, the Reagan-Thatcher era long forgotten, as is the Communist era. State paternalism, regulation and control, social and environmental blocking of the functioning of markets, constructivism and dirigism are here again and, especially in Europe, are stronger than ever. We must get back to Hayek’s teachings. We must once again take his books into our hands and try to spread his thoughts all over the world, because now they are as relevant as in the past."

"Hayek’s quarrels with Aristotle are of the same character as his conversations with Sir Karl Popper and Milton Friedman: the welcome criticism of peers, those who can recognise the same premisses needed to define a given problem, however they may come to differ over their conclusions. Only now do we begin to realise that something valuable may have been driven from the world when the continuity and tradition of Western civilisation was shattered in the same blows that destroyed unwanted empires. Now in Eastern Europe there is nostalgic talk of the good old days under the Hapsburg empire. The evolution of knowledge is inseparable from the evolution of language, and something invaluable is lost when 'sound bytes' replace the human voice, heard in face-to-face discussion of mutual concerns. Inflection counts for much, and what is not said can only be recognised when allusion and irony are possible. So Vienna waltzes."

"The most intelligent defender of capitalism today … who has as fine and as powerful a mind as is to be found anywhere."

"As a result of the efforts of Hayek, Friedman, and the many others who share their general outlook, the idea of a centrally planned and centrally administered economy, so popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been discredited."

"Hayek has as fine and as powerful a mind as is to be found anywhere, and [his] Constitution of Liberty is one of the most thoughtful works of the last decades."

"It is in good part because of Professor Hayek's work [on the topic of social engineering], and also because of his profound insights — most notably in The Constitution of Liberty — into the connection between a free market, the rule of law, and individual liberty, that you don't hear professors saying today, as they used so glibly to say, that 'we are all socialists now."

"But the Hayek thing is almost entirely about politics rather than economics. Without The Road To Serfdom — and the way that book was used by vested interests to oppose the welfare state — nobody would be talking about his business cycle ideas."

"Marxist theory and over-capitalisation theories overlap. The true heir to this theory is an arch-conservative, von Hayek, who paradoxically and honestly recognised Marx's paternity... The essential point is not to be found in von Hayek's conservative conclusions, but in his analysis of the causes of the boom and depression, which, as he himself admits, strongly resembles the Marxian one."

"The central dilemma of Hayek's political philosophy is, given his view of the limited role reason can play in social life, how is it possible to mount a systematic defence of liberalism without falling victim to the very kinds of rationalism he criticises? This difficulty stays unresolved in Hayek’s political thought because it is informed by two incompatible assumptions about what reason can achieve."

"This tension in Hayek's thought, between the rationalist advocacy of liberal reform and the anti-rationalist critique of all social reconstruction, has inclined one commentator to describe his political theory as 'Utopian non-engineering'. While the word 'Utopian' might exaggerate a little the rationalist character of his thought, this term captures well the unstable nature of the Hayekian system of ideas. For, in the end, a Humean scepticism about the powers of reason is incompatible with a Kantian insistence on the priority of rationally justifiable principles. Hayek has tried to cast himself in the image of that most improbable of creatures: the principled sceptic."

"Hayek’s views should be considered because, in addressing institutional questions, he has not made the mistake of confining the problems of liberalism within national boundaries."

"Hayek should be taken seriously because he has correctly identified as the most serious problems confronting civilization in the twentieth century the problems of nationalism and totalitarianism. Even with the dereliction of European communism at the end of the twentieth century, the problems which remain or are reemerging in the shape of ethnic conflict, separatist national movements, and regional trading blocs stem from practices and ideas which the liberal tradition has consistently criticized: ideas hostile to individualist, universalist, and egalitarian moral principles. While thinkers like Hannah Arendt have also recognized the threat and moral danger posed by totalitarianism, it is in Hayek’s work that we have the most thorough attempt to understand the logic of its institutional alternative."

"Roughly speaking, Lundberg argued that Gunnar Myrdal's work has been enormously important, and noted that there was local pressure on the Nobel Prize Committee to recognize him, but wondered how it would be received abroad if this was done. (Remember that the Prize was then rather new, and Lundberg had to be careful about its reputation.) Giersch's reply was that the quality of the work surely merited the award, but maybe the politics of it would be easier if there was a joint recipient who was neither Swedish nor shared Myrdal's views – what about Hayek? That's it – is this where Hayek's prize came from, or was he already high on the list, or what?"

"Hayek is by no means as rational and irrefutable as the right would have it. Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical. But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic. In Road [to Serfdom], first published in 1944, he makes a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life. At least as far as he takes the argument in this book, there isn’t much that thoughtful modern liberals or even democratic socialists who understand the power of markets would necessarily object to—although they might feel that there is more to the story than Hayek acknowledges."

"Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom). He rejects the very concept of social justice, for much the same reasons that he rejects the arbitrary valuation of labor: in Hayek’s view there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because he locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, he sees no way in which any claim can be generalized to society. Hayek’s political philosophy recognizes only negative rights. Positive fulfillment beyond the most basic needs is a matter of individual striving."

"In the 20th century, three world wars facilitated a Communist revolution, a Fascist backlash and the subsequent collapse of both. The weakness of bureaucratic information flows (relative to market-based competitors) undermined Communist economies – a point emphasized by Frederick Hayek, the co-leader (with Murray Rothbard) of the fourth generation Austrian School of Economics. Flows of information and disinformation played pivotal roles in the First, Second and Third (that is, Cold) World Wars."

"Friedrich Hayek is the twentieth-century social theorist who, probably more than any other, found himself vindicated by events — if not wholly, then at least in his central contention. He is also the one who, more than any other, himself exercised a significant political influence."

"Although he is very probably unaware of this book and of my work in general, I want to express a very belated thanks to Friedrich A. Hayek. His work had much more of an influence on me than I realized during the writing of the First Edition [of The End of Liberalism] I neither began nor ended as a Hayekist but instead found myself confirming, by process of elimination and discovery, many of his fears about the modern liberal state."

"It is likely that many modern economists would have no difficulty accepting Hayek's statement of the problem (of macroeconomics) as roughly equivalent to their own. Whether or not this is so, I wish … to argue that it should be so, or that the most rapid progress toward a coherent and useful aggregate economic theory will result from the acceptance of the problem statement as advanced by [Hayek]."

"One of the most original and most important ideas advanced by Hayek is the role of the "division of knowledge" in economic society … [But if] I had to single out the area in which Hayek's contributions were the most fundamental and pathbreaking, I would cast my vote for the theory of capital. As I said before, when I reviewed Hayek's book on The Pure Theory of Capital, it is "my sincere conviction that this work contains some of the most penetrating thoughts on the subject that have ever been published." If two achievements may be named, I would add Hayek's contributions to the theory of economic planning. Most of what has been written on systems analysis, computerized data processing, simulation of market processes, and other techniques of decision-making without the aid of competitive markets, appears shallow and superficial in the light of Hayek's analysis of the 'division of knowledge', its dispersion among masses of people. Information in the minds of millions of people is not available to any central body or any group of decision-makers who have to determine prices, employment, production, and investment but do not have the signals provided by a competitive market mechanism. Most plans for economic reform in the socialist countries seem to be coming closer to the realization that increasing decentralization of decision-making is needed to solve the problems of rational economic planning."

"Well I mentioned Hayek. There are two ways. One is because of my interest in political economy. The other way is that Hayek was a pioneer in the use of information in economics. One of the papers that Karl and I wrote together that I continue to like was a paper called "The Uses of Money". In that paper we tried to incorporate information and the cost of information to explain why people use money. One of Hayek's most basic ideas is that institutions are a way of reducing uncertainty. Man struggles to find institutional arrangements which on average make life a bit more predictable. Our "Uses of Money" is not so much about money as we conventionally think about it, it's about the idea of a medium of exchange, the function of an institution called the medium of exchange and how the medium of exchange as an institution resolves a part of peoples uncertainty about the future."

"All of this, of course, establishes Hayek's primacy over Hicks in the origin of the notion of intertemporal equilibrium."

"Although the democratic left is unlikely to find his views very palatable, at least one lesson can be learned by contemplating Hayek’s life. He shows us what can sometimes be achieved by sticking doggedly to your guns, ignoring intellectual fashion, and waiting until your moment comes. Hayek had only one tune to play, the virtues of the free-market economy as opposed to central planning, but he played it with panache, could improvise longer or shorter versions as the occasion demanded, and above all never gave up practicing."

"He relapsed into a crude identification of socialism with Soviet-style central planning, even though, in the West at any rate, there were very few actual socialists who continued to accept that equation."

"If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy."

"Friedrich A. von Hayek, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, says that on the whole he approves of the economic policy of the Reagan Administration. Yet, when he discusses particulars, Professor von Hayek - a conservative who is best known as an unrelenting opponent of Socialism and lesser forms of economic interventionism -sounds less than approving. He applauds the determination in Washington and London to stop inflation but laments that both Governments seek gradual progress. "You have to do it rapidly and drastically," he says."

"Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market. (footnote 4: The original contributions were those of Hayek (1937 and 1945))."

"I was very flattered when I once got a note from Hayek saying that he would like to come and talk with me. He had read The Rise of the Western World, and he thought it was a very interesting book. He came to Seattle and spent two days with me. We had a good time and I really enjoyed him. But I wish I had known then what I have learned since, so that I could have appreciated his visit more appropriately. I had never read his stuff on cognitive science in those days. He still seems to me the greatest economist of the twentieth century, and by a long way. If you look for people who really want to try and understand the world, Hayek came closer to that ideal than anybody who has ever lived."

"Arguably the most influential economist of this century."

"I can testify from personal experience to the immense stimulus and direction which Hayek's migration to this country [Great Britain] gave to economic research in the 1930s, not only in London and economics faculties throughout the United Kingdom, but also in the international world of scholarship."

"I think that I have learned more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski … but not even excepting Russell."

"Our intellectual productivity is declining. Still, yours is admirable. You can still lecture (I cannot)....I know that you feel that you cannot do the work you used to do, and although you have told me and others about it, you kept it hidden from your observant friends—even though you complain to them of it, and draw their attention to it.... But apart from the field of intellectual production, you have done so much for others. There are many former students you have encouraged and helped on their way. And there are many who, like myself, have been helped by you in the most critical stages of their development."

"You will never know how much you have done for me. When I was in New Zealand, out of the world and buried by all my philosophical colleagues, you remembered me. It was through you that I came back into the world. It was through you (and Ernst Gombrich) that The Open Society was published, after a period (before you interfered) which led...me almost to despair. And when I came to the LSE [London School of Economics], through you, you gave me so much encouragement and help....There cannot be, ever, equality or reciprocity between you and me. I never could do anything for you, and it is extremely unlikely that I ever shall."

"I have created myself a kind of generational gulf between you and myself. Although you were only 3 years old when I was born, you became, as I now realize, a kind of father figure....[E]ven now, when I am 82, and we have been friends for so many years, you still are! And, strangely enough, you yourself...described your feelings towards me as those towards a young man who has made good."

"I should like to mention that I did not know Hayek’s book (The Road to Serfdom) when I wrote mine; in fact, my book was finished about six months before his. All I knew was a little pamphlet “Freedom and the Economic System,” in which he advocates “Planning for Freedom.”...The acknowledgement in my book refers to his practical help rather than to his influence; but since I wrote my book, I have read Hayek’s book (and several excellent articles), and I can only say that I have learned a very great deal from it. A few leftists here in England are in the same position ....Hayek, who I had seen only four or five times before, has been really wonderful to me in his many repeated approaches to various publishers, and I understand from the people here in the School [the London School of Economics] that he is always so. His interest in my book was mainly due to the fact that he too is hoping for a common basis of discussion for socialists and liberals."

"Well … I've always been a voracious reader — I have read the economic views of von Mises and Hayek, and … Bastiat … I know about Cobden and Bright in England — and the elimination of the corn laws and so forth, the great burst of economy or prosperity for England that followed."

"As someone who came to Fredrick von Hayek comparatively late in life, I’m still catching up with him…Indeed, many of the insights I thought I had discovered in my own readings and writings on the frontier of evolutionary biology and economics it turns out Hayek had long before me…The field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek quite badly."

"What distinguishes the theoretical men of the right from their counterparts on the left, Anderson writes, is that their voices were “heard in the chancelleries.” Yet whose voice has been more listened to, across decades and continents, than Hayek’s? Schmitt and Strauss have attracted readers from all points of the political spectrum as writers of dazzling if disturbing genius, but the two projects with which they are most associated—European fascism and American neoconservatism—have never generated the global traction or gathering energy that neoliberalism has now sustained for more than four decades. It would be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between the marginal children of Nietzsche—with political man on one branch of the family tree, economic man on the other. Hayek, at times, could sound the most Schmittian notes. At the height of Augusto Pinochet’s power in Chile, Hayek told a Chilean interviewer that when any “government is in a situation of rupture, and there are no recognized rules, rules have to be created.” The sort of situation he had in mind was not anarchy or civil war but Allende-style social democracy, where the government pursues “the mirage of social justice” through administrative and increasingly discretionary means. Even in The Constitution of Liberty, an extended paean to the notion of a “spontaneous order” that slowly evolves over time, we get a brief glimpse of “the lawgiver” whose “task” it is “to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself.” (“Of the modern German writings” on the rule of law, Hayek also says, Schmitt’s “are still among the most learned and perceptive.”) Current events seemed to supply Hayek with an endless parade of candidates. Two years after its publication in 1960, he sent The Constitution of Liberty to Portuguese strongman António Salazar, with a cover note professing his hope that it might assist the dictator “in his endeavour to design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy.” Pinochet’s Constitution of 1980 is named after the 1960 text. Still, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that though Nietzschean politics may have fought the battles, Nietzschean economics won the war. Is there any better reminder of that victory than the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus in Berlin? Built to house the Luftwaffe during World War II, it is now the headquarters of the German Ministry of Finance."

"Here’s where things get interesting. Though Hayek abandoned formal economics for social theory after the 1930s, his social theory remained dedicated to elaborating what he saw as the essential problem of economics: how to allocate finite resources between different purposes when society cannot agree on its basic ends. With its emphasis on the irreconcilability of our moral ends—the fact that members of a modern society do not and cannot agree on a scale of values—Hayek’s point was fundamentally political, the sort of insight that has agitated everyone from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Hayek was unique, however, in arguing that the political point was best addressed—indeed, could only be addressed—in the realm of the economic. No other discourse— not moral philosophy, political theory, psychology, or theology— understood so well that our ultimate moral values and political purposes get expressed and revealed only under conditions of radical economic constraint—when one is forced to assign a limited set of resources to ends that favor different sectors of society."

"The intrinsic links between moral and economic life, as well as the intractability of moral conflict, were the kernels of insight that animated Hayek’s most far-reaching writing against socialism. The socialist presumes an agreement on ultimate ends: the putatively shared understanding of principles such as justice or equality is supposed to make it possible for state planners to conceive of their task as technical, as the neutral application of an agreed-upon rule. But no such agreement exists, Hayek insisted, and if it is presumed to exist, nothing will reveal its nonexistence more quickly than the attempt to implement it in practice."

"I think it's a scandal that he's not one of the absolute required names on political theory reading lists for modern political thought or 20th century political thought. I know this gets into some sensitive terrain, but he absolutely should be there alongside Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Arendt. And certainly should be there over Berlin, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Schmitt. Obviously, more is better, and I want students to read everything, but we have to make choices, and I'd put H. ahead of Berlin et al."

"I very well remember Hayek's visit to Cambridge on his way to the London School. He expounded his theory and covered a black-board with his triangles. The whole argument, as we could see later, consisted in confusing the current rate of investment with the total stock of capital goods, but we could not make it out at the time."

"Lange argued that what economists now call neoclassical price theory showed the possibility of combining central planning and the market, and Hayek retorted that planning would subvert at its heart the mechanism that gave capitalism its vitality. Hayek’s criticisms of market socialism, and more recently those of Janos Kornai, are for the most part on the mark. But the experiences of capitalism, as well as of socialism, in the last fifty years suggest ways of reformulating the concept of market socialism in response to the Hayekian critique of its intellectual ancestor."

"While often right and enormously influential, Hayek himself agreed that some of his predictions did not become true."

"Since Hayek was radically scornful of human reason, he could not, like John Locke or the Scholastics, elaborate a libertarian system of personal and property rights based on the insights of human reason into natural law. Nor could he, like Mises, emphasize man's rational insight into the vital importance of laissez-faire for the flourishing and even survival of the human race, or of foregoing any coercive intervention into the vast and interdependent network of the free market economy. Instead, Hayek had to fall back on the importance of blindly obeying whatever social rules happened to have "evolved," and his only feeble argument against intervention was that the government was even more irrational and was even more ignorant, than individuals in the market economy."

"Hayek and Nozick both think that talk of distributive justice is misleading, because it suggests the presence of a distributing person or mechanism; in a developed economy there is no such thing, and in a free society, the attempt to institute such a thing would destroy all freedom. Hayek, however, supports this view with an account of the computational impossibility of deciding what to produce and dis tribute in order to achieve justice, while Nozick is more concerned to emphasize that the state has no right to seize the resources of individuals in order to distribute them according to any principle whatever."

"Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness."

"Hayek […] seemingly would severely limit mankind’s ability to design the future through the process of working things out. But Hayek rejects neither reason nor deliberative critique nor constructivism. The exercise of reason in deliberative critique in the service of reconstruction of economy, polity, and society is not only called for but is part and parcel of the Mengerian argument. Constructivism is inherent in the body of social theory developed by Hayek. Constructivism is practiced by Hayek. It is the fundamental logic of his life’s work. In a sense, his own practice constitutes the negation of his own argument."

"The Coase-Samuelson generation were brought up witnessing the great debate between von Mises and Lerner-Lange concerning the feasibility of socialist rational pricing to produce Utopia. (That was a reprise of earlier Pareto-Barone-Wieser-Taylor debates.) Many contemporaries believed Lerner-Lange triumphed in the debate. I came to believe that Friedrich Hayek was the true victor. Under static conditions where all is known or knowable (to whom?), whatever optimal states laissez-faire might occasion, so could some computer solution or some algorithms of play the game of competition also achieve. But in the real world all is changing, even in the time it takes me to write this sentence. Hayek has been persuasive — not in Whig ideology or in declaring that moderate reform of laissez-faire leads inevitably down the road to totalitarian socialism but — in arguing that experience suggests that only with heavy dependence on market pricing mechanisms can there be realized quasi-efficient and quasi-progressive organization of societies involving humans as Darwinian history has equeathed them. If a reader does not find the Hayek dynamic arguments persuasive, I will not here argue the matter further."

"The Hayek I met on various occasions – at the LSE, at the University of Chicago, in Stockholm (1945), at Lake Constance-Lindau Nobel summer conferences – definitely bemoaned progressive income taxation, state-provided medical care and retirement pensions, fiat currencies remote from gold and subject to discretionary policy decisions by central bank and treasury agents."

"Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell."

"Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today."

"I am not persuaded that Hayek got the substantive connections entirely right. He was too captivated by the enabling effects of the market system on human freedoms and tended to downplay - though he never fully ignored - the lack of freedom for some that may result from a complete reliance on the market system, with its exclusions and imperfections, and the social effects of big disparities in the ownership of assets. But it would be hard to deny Hayek's immense contribution to our understanding of the importance of judging institutions by the criterion of freedom."

"Our debt to Hayek is very substantial. He helped to establish a freedom-based approach of evaluation through which economic systems can be judged (no matter what substantive judgments we arrive at). He pointed to the importance of identifying those services that the state can perform well and has a social duty to undertake. Finally, he showed why administrative psychology and propensities to corruptibility have to be considered in determining how states can, or cannot, work and how the world can, or cannot, be run."

"Hayek himself gradually identified with classical liberalism in a more specific sense. But it seems to me an open question just where his arguments should lead us. Hayek himself started with socialist concerns and sentiments. He also clearly favored extra-market welfare provision, at least within rich countries, and his Road to Serfdom allows for government to play quite a considerable role. I would have thought that his arguments point us in the direction of ideas that everyone should pay attention to, rather than just offering a positive program for one specific view of politics. At the same time we may find that the kind of structural characteristics that he discerns in our society, and the kind of freedom we need in order to learn, may make certain kinds of otherwise attractive ideals difficult to pursue. They may also, however, make it difficult for us to solve certain other kinds of problem – such as some issues concerned with the environment."

"No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek."

"Friedrich Hayek, who died on March 23, 1992 at age 92, was arguably the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. By the time of his death, his fundamental way of thought had supplanted the system of John Maynard Keynes — his chief intellectual rival of the century — in the battle since the 1930s for the minds of economists and the policies of governments.""

"[Hayek] became [in his later years] the dominant intellectual influence of the last quarter of the twentieth century."

"Which of Hayek's ideas are now widely accepted? I can't think of any. … Hayek's big idea - basically, that efficient market outcomes are emergent - is absent from most econ (though supported by lab experiments)."

"Hayek, in my view, is the leading economic thinker of the 20th century."

"I first had to discover certain things for myself, and essentially it was the behavior I observed in human subjects in my laboratory study of markets that motivated me eventually to study Hayek seriously. Reading with the eyes of a new mind, I was able to appreciate an enormous depth of understanding in the work of Hayek that would have escaped me if I had not had this personal experience in the laboratory."

"The source of confusion here is that there was a Good Hayek and a Bad Hayek. The Good Hayek was a serious scholar who was particularly interested in the role of knowledge in the economy (and in the rest of society). Since knowledge—about technological possibilities, about citizens’ preferences, about the interconnections of these, about still more—is inevitably and thoroughly decentralized, the centralization of decisions is bound to generate errors and then fail to correct them. The consequences for society can be calamitous, as the history of central planning confirms. That is where markets come in. All economists know that a system of competitive markets is a remarkably efficient way to aggregate all that knowledge while preserving decentralization."

"The Bad Hayek emerged when he aimed to convert a wider public. Then, as often happens, he tended to overreach, and to suggest more than he had legitimately argued. The Road to Serfdom was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into “serfdom.” The correlations often run the other way. Sixty-five years later, Hayek’s implicit prediction is a failure, rather like Marx’s forecast of the coming “immiserization of the working class.”"

"Mrs. Hayek, I want you each day in the future to address your husband and inquire what his progress has been in what I consider to be one of the most interesting and intriguing fields, the evolution of the work of scholars."

"What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy."

"Popper's falsification is intimately connected to the notion of an . ...one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge. Karl Popper shared ideas with his friend, the low-key economist von Hayek, who endorsed capitalism as a state in which prices can disseminate information that bureaucratic socialism would choke."

"During the following decade [of the 1950s] modern economic history took a dramatic swing away from the liberal-left consensus established by the Hammonds, Tawney and the Webbs. The seminal text for this change of direction was the 1954 collection of essays compiled by F. A. Hayek, "Capitalism and the Historians"."

"Even by the standards of his day Friedrich Hayek’s thought was wide-ranging and covered fields as diverse as economics, psychology, jurisprudence and social and political theory. Yet, despite this heterogeneity, underlying his intellectual contribution is a unifying philosophical approach centred upon a conception of mind and of the nature of reason. It is to this foundational aspect of Heyek’s thought, then, that attention must be paid if one is to understand his wider contributions. Regrettably, in an introductory text, there is only so much in-depth critical appraisal that one can undertake. For this reason, and by setting out his views on a variety of topics and appraising them where possible, the main purpose of this book will be to familiarise the reader with the principal themes of Hayek’s thought and to ascertain the extent to which his contributions may be considered to form a coherent system."

"Our inspiration was less Rab Butler's Industrial Charter than books like Colm Brogan's anti-socialist satire, Our New Masters … and Hayek's powerful Road to Serfdom, dedicated to 'the socialists of all parties'. Such books not only provided crisp, clear analytical arguments against socialism, demonstrating how its economic theories were connected to the then depressing shortages of our daily lives; but by their wonderful mockery of socialist follies, they also gave us the feeling that the other side simply could not win in the end. That is a vital feeling in politics; it eradicates past defeats and builds future victories. It left a permanent mark on my own political character, making me a long-term optimist for free enterprise and liberty."

"Adam Smith, the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman."

"For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application."

"All the general propositions favouring freedom I had … imbibed at my father's knee or acquired by candle-end reading of Burke and Hayek ..""

"Hayek's analysis of the perils of the planned society and the command economy is, indeed, unrivalled. He shows how attempts to defy markets are doomed to be self-defeating. He warns us that beneath the seductive slogans and the simplistic targets of the utopians who promise heaven on earth there frequently lurks the reality of a totalitarian hell. He reminds us that we must value the habits, rules and institutions of liberty for their own sake if we are to enjoy for long the benefits that freedom brings. And all these messages are as relevant to our own age as when he first spoke to the West about that Road to Serfdom. Perhaps more so. This is because Hayek is still the preeminent modern philosopher of ordered liberty — something that in every continent is today under threat from dark forces of anarchy, hatred, revolution, fanaticism and violence. Against such ideologues, he encourages us to have faith in the peaceful, subtle processes by which people co-operate in fulfilling their requirements under a rule of law; to rely on an extended, spontaneous order; in short, to promote the system generally known as capitalism. Hayek is, therefore, the prophet not of doom and disaster, but of peace and plenty. His is a voice of wisdom for our time, and for all time. We should listen to him."

"The key importance of the amount of information available and the frequent lack of relevant information have been dealt with only in the last decades. L. von Mises and F. A. von Hayek can rightly be regarded as pioneers in this connection."

"It does tend to make Hayek a much more systematic thinker in this area than he was. I am not saying that Hayek thought of himself as a good economist but only a moderately good political scientist or philosopher, but that is the fact. […] To repeat what I said above, Hayek was only a moderately good political scientist or philosopher. (I should say that Hayek's view of my work was much the same: He thought I was a good economist but didn't like my political science.)"

"The most interesting among the courageous dissenters of the 1980s were the classical liberals, disciples of F. A. Hayek, from whom they had learned about the crucial importance of economic freedom and about the often-ignored conceptual difference between liberalism and democracy."

"Everyone in Boston of a certain age knows the story of Rosie Ruiz, the marathoner who crossed the Boston finish line in 1980 at 2:31.56, flabby thighs and all, having barely broken a sweat. Despite mounting skepticism, she basked in the glory of having run the third-fastest female marathon in history – for a few days, that is, until a couple of students remembered seeing her jump out of the crowd half a mile from the finish. Something of the sort has been going on recently with the shade of Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian economist, who died in 1992 just short of what would have been his ninety-third birthday, never made false claims for himself – far from it: he knew all too well the loneliness of the long distance runner. And scrupulous work as editor by the late W.W. Bartley, interpreter Bruce Caldwell, and biographer Alan Ebenstein, have made it possible to see the man clear. But the claims conservatives are making about the role he played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus. That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race."

"Nearly two decades ago, during dinner with the late Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, I asked him if he had the power to write one law that would get government out of our lives, what would that law be? Hayek replied he'd write a law that read: Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans. He elaborated: If Congress makes payments to one American for not raising pigs, every American not raising pigs should also receive payments. Obviously, were there to be such a law, there would be reduced capacity for privilege-granting by Congress and less influence-peddling."

"Coming back to the question in the heading: how should Hayek be seen, after all, as an intellectual hero or an ideologue? In my (European) view, the answer would be: Under the historical condition which Hayek developed his liberal social philosophy, his courageous opposition to a fashionable, pro-socialist Zeitgeist made him an outstanding intellectual. However, as I tried to point out, he misunderstood or did not wish to understand the role of income redistribution in a free society. Instead, his continued crusading against allegedly atavistic ideals of material equality puts income redistribution at par with socialist irrationalism. This one-sided interpretation paved the way for his arguments to be over-simplified for political partisanship in the United States. Hayek’s new adherents fail to account for his intellectual stature and make him appear post mortem like an ideologue."

"Of the splendid constellation of great names... we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory," — so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence, — so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it."

"Time! Time! Time! — we must not impugn the Scripture Chronology, but we must interpret it in accordance with whatever shall appear on fair enquiry to be the truth for there cannot be two truths. And really there is scope enough: for the lives of the Patriarchs may as reasonably be extended to 5000 or 50000 years apiece as the days of Creation to as many thousand millions of years."

"Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading... Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history,—with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him."

"Not to feel elevated on an occasion like the present, by this noble, this magnificent testimony of approbation of my friends, is not in human nature — at all events, it is not in my nature; but if any overweaning self-complacency might arise, and mix itself with my feelings at this moment, there is one consideration which would suffice to set it at rest for ever. . . The assembly, magnificent as it is, comprising in itself, as it does, the elite of everything that is illustrious in rank, talent, wealth, in the metropolis — this very assembly is a proof of the justice to which I have adverted I should be weak indeed, if I supposed that all this glorious array has reference to myself. No; it has reference to a far higher and more dignified object. I am but as one drop in the ocean. Every man of science will feel quite as much a sharer in the honors of the day, will feel quite as much distinguished by this assembly as I can be; for when, ere this, would it have been possible to collect together such an assembly as is around me to do honor to science, place it n preeminence, and crown it with distinction? This is, indeed, a new era — this is a memorable day for science, and every man who regards truth for its own sake will feel that on this occasion the eyes of the country are on him, and that England expects every man to do his duty! By that I have been able to accomplish in Africa, I have been amply rewarded; but I stand here not so much for anything of this nature, but as the representative of a class that is distinguished — of a principle which is triumphant; and I hope we shall never allow ourselves to forget the infinitely higher and more important circumstance, that it is the great truths of science, that it is the interpretation of God's great book of nature, and not the men who interpret these pages, that are the ultimate objects of all this praise."

"Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue."

"What God sends is welcome."

"God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives"

"Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design."

"We must never forget that it is principles, not phenomena, — laws not insulated independent facts, — which are the objects of inquiry to the natural philosopher. As truth is single, and consistent with itself, a principle may be as completely and as plainly elucidated by the most familiar and simple fact, as by the most imposing and uncommon phenomenon. The colours which glitter on a soapbubble are the immediate consequence of a principle the most important, from the variety of phenomena it explains, and the most beautiful, from its simplicity and compendious neatness, in the whole science of optics. If the nature of periodical colours can be made intelligible by the contemplation of such a trivial object, from that moment it becomes a noble instrument in the eye of correct judgment; and to blow a large, regular, and durable soap-bubble may become the serious and praise-worthy endeavour of a sage, while children stand round and scoff, or children of a larger growth hold up their hands in astonishment at such waste of time and trouble. To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling. From the least of nature's works he may learn the greatest lessons. The fall of an apple to the ground may raise his thoughts to the laws which govern the revolutions of the planets in their orbits; or the situation of a pebble may afford him evidence of the state of the globe he inhabits, myriads of ages ago, before his species became its denizens. And this, is, in fact, one of the great sources of delight which the study of natural science imparts to its votaries. A mind which has once imbibed a taste for scientific inquiry, and has learnt the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur, has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations. One would think that Shakspeare had such a mind in view when he describes a contemplative man as finding"

"To ascend to the origin of things and speculate on the creation, is not the business of the natural philosopher. An humbler field is sufficient for him in the endeavor to discover, as far as our faculties will permit; what are these primary qualities impressed on matter, and to discover the spirit of the laws of nature"

"Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one."

"The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry."

"Unfortunately... the philosophy of Aristotle laid it down as a principle, that the celestial motions were regulated by laws proper to themselves, and bearing no affinity to those which prevail on earth. By thus drawing a broad and impassable line of separation between celestial and terrestrial mechanics, it placed the former altogether out of the pale of experimental research, while it at the same time impeded the progress of the latter by the assumption of principles respecting natural and unnatural motions, hastily adopted from the most superficial and cursory and remark, undeserving even the name of observation. Astronomy therefore continued for ages a science of mere record, in which theory had no part, except in so far as it attempted to conciliate the inequalities of the celestial motions with that assumed law of uniform circular revolution which was alone considered consistent with the perfection of the heavenly mechanism."

"In whatever state of knowledge we may conceive man to be placed, his progress towards a yet higher state need never fear a check, but must continue till the last existence of society."

"If ever this theory of the Sun-Force being the primal cause of all life on earth, and of all motion in heaven, is accepted, and if that other far bolder theory of Herschel, about certain organisms in the Sun, is accepted even as a provisional hypothesis, then will our teachings be vindicated, and Esoteric allegory will be shown to have anticipated Modern Science by millions of years, probably, for such are the Archaic Teachings."

"What is there in Paradise Lost to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?"

"We must limit even the conception of necessary sequence, which is held to express all that is known of causation. There is no following of effects from causes; but as Sir John Herschel more truly says, the causes and effects are simultaneous."

"Herschel has noticed how the Stagirite obstructed the progress of astronomy by not identifying celestial with terrestrial mechanics, but laying down the principle that celestial motions were regulated by peculiar laws, thus placing them entirely without the pale of experimental research, while at the same time the progress of mechanics was impeded by the assumption of natural and unnatural motions."

"As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone."

"Let me at the outset record my opinion of mathematics; I cannot do this better than by adopting, the words of Sir J. Herschel, to the influence of which I gratefully attribute the direction of my own early studies. The words are deserving of serious attention, as proceeding from one whose taste and ability had conducted him through the encyclopaedia of human knowledge; and I venture to think that at the present time they are at least as applicable as when they were addressed to a preceding generation. Sir J. Herschel says of Astronomy, "Admission to its sanctuary, and to the privileges and feelings of a votary, can only be gained by one means,—sound and sufficient knowledge of mathematics, the great instrument of all exact inquiry, without which no man can ever make such advances in this or any other of the higher departments of science as can entitle him to form an independent opinion on any subject of discussion within their range.""

"As to the Income Tax, my opinion is that the needful revenue would be fairly and most fairly raised if paid by property, and by individuals in proportion to their property...A Property Tax should be an assessment upon all land and buildings, and canals and railroads, but not on property such as machinery, stock in trade, etc. The aristocracy have squeezed all they can out of the mass of the consumers, and now they lay their daring hands on those not wholly impoverished."

"To the Working Men of Rochdale: A deep sympathy with you in your present circumstances induces me to address you. Listen and reflect, even though you may not approve. Your are suffering—you have long suffered. Your wages have for many years declined, and your position has gradually and steadily become worse. Your sufferings have naturally produced discontent, and you have turned eagerly to almost any scheme which gave hope of relief. Many of you know full well that neither an act of Parliament nor the act of a multitude can keep up wages. You know that trade has long been bad, and that with a bad trade wages cannot rise. If you are resolved to compel an advance of wages, you cannot compel manufacturers to give you employment. Trade must yield a profit, or it will not long be carried on...The aristocracy are powerful and determined; and, unhappily, the middle classes are not yet intelligent enough to see the safety of extending political power to the whole people. The working classes can never gain it of themselves. Physical force you wisely repudiate. It is immoral, and you have no arms, and little organisations...Your first step to entire freedom must be commercial freedom—freedom of industry. We must put an end to the partial famine which is destroying trade, and demand for your labor, your wages, your comforts, and your independence. The aristocracy regard the Anti-Corn Law League as their greatest enemy. That which is the greatest enemy of the remorseless aristocracy of Britain must almost of necessity be your firmest friend. Every man who tells you to support the Corn Law is your enemy—every man who hastens, by a single hour, the abolition of the Corn Law, shortens by so much the duration of your sufferings. Whilst the inhuman law exists, your wages must decline. When it is abolished, and not till then, they will rise."

"I do not see that it is possible, nor can I discover that it would be right, for me now to withdraw from the cause in which I have so long taken so deep an interest. The work is great, and vast are the results depending upon it, and unhappily our laborers are not abundant...But conscious of the increasing hazard we run owing to the long continuance of monopolies, and beholding the appalling sufferings of multitudes of my fellow-creatures, and satisfied that all benevolence and charity and the teaching of religion and of schools fall short of much of their full effect owing to the degraded and impoverished condition of the people—I should feel myself guilty, as possessing abundance and leaving others to hunger, nakedness and immorality and deepest ignorance and crime, if I were to retire into domestic quiet and leave the struggle to be carried on entirely by others."

"I believe that the intelligence of the people in Scotland is superior to the intelligence of the people in England. I take it from these facts. Before going to the meetings, we often asked the committee or the people with whom we came in contact, "Are there any fallacies which the working people hold on this question? Have they any crotchets about machinery, or wages, or anything else?" And the universal reply was, "No; you may make a speech about what you like; they understand the question thoroughly; and it is no use confining yourself to machinery or wages, for there are few men, probably no man here, who would be taken in by such raw jests as those." …I told them that they were the people who should have repeal of the Union; for that, if they are separate from England, they might have a government wholly popular and intelligent, to a degree which I believe does not exist in any other country on the face of the earth. However, I believe they will be disposed to press us on, and make us become more and more intelligent; and we may receive benefits from our contact with them, even though, for some ages to come, our connexion with them may be productive of evil to themselves."

"The Corn Law is as great a robbery of the man who follows the plough as it is of him who minds the loom...If there be one view of the question which stimulates me to harder work in this cause than another, it is the fearful sufferings which I know to exist amongst the rural laborers in almost every part of this kingdom...And then a fat and sleek dean, a dignitary of the Church and a great philosopher, recommends for the consumption of the people—he did not read a paper about the supplies that were to be had in the great valley of the Mississippi—but he said that there were swede, turnip and mangel-wurzel; and the Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, if to out-Herod Herod himself, recommends hot water and a pinch of curry-powder. The people of England have not, even under thirty years of Corn Law influence, been sunk so low as to submit tamely to this insult and wrong. It is enough that a law should be passed to make your toil valueless, to make your skill and labor unavailing to procure for you a fair supply of the common necessaries of life—but when to this grievous iniquity they add the insult of telling you to go, like beasts that perish, to mangel-wurzel, or to something which even the beasts themselves cannot eat, then I believe the people of England will rise, and with one voice proclaim the downfall of this odious system."

"Rich and great people can take care of themselves; but the poor and defenceless—the men with small cottages and large families—the men who must work six days every week if they are to live in anything like comfort for a week,—these men want defenders; they want men to maintain their position in Parliament; they want men who will protest against any infringement of their rights."

"I am amused to find the fuss our Darlington friends and relatives are making about the Education Bill. Edward Pease, John Pease, etc., all attending a public meeting, making speeches, moving resolutions, promoting agitation, leaving their sweet retirement and the enjoyment of their otium cum dignitate for the tumult of political strife, and all because the Government are disposed to add another link to the fetter which has galled us. Alas! and can these men be really blind to the causes of the miseries of the people, and to the source [viz. the Corn Laws] of the physical and moral degradation which permits the heartless aristocracy of Britain to trample unpunished upon every right, human and divine? The time will come when all will have to speak. Aggression follows aggression; enthralment of the mind naturally treads upon the heels of physical prostration, and we are becoming a people powerless, spiritless, and trained to bonds and to wrong."

"I am a working man as much as you. My father was as poor as any man in this crowd. He was of your own body, entirely. He boasts not—nor do I—of birth, nor of great family distinctions. What he has made, he has made by his own industry and successful commerce. What I have comes from him, and from my own exertions. I have no interest in the extravagance of government; I have no interest in seeking appointments under any government; I have no interest in pandering to the views of any government; I have nothing to gain by being the tool of any party. I come before you as the friend of my own class and order; as one of the people; as one who would, on all occasions, be the firm defender of your rights, and the asserter of all those privileges to which you are justly entitled. It is on these grounds that I offer myself to your notice; it is on these grounds that I solicit your suffrages."

"If a man have three or four children, he has just three or four times as much interest in having the Corn Laws abolished as the man who has none. Your children will grow up to be men and women. It may be that your heads will be laid in the grave before they come to manhood or womanhood; but they will grow up, and want employment at honest trades—want houses and furniture, food and clothing, and all the necessaries and comforts of life. They will be honest and industrious as yourselves. But the difficulties which surround you will be increased tenfold by the time they have arrived at your age. Trade will then have become still more crippled; the supply of food still more diminished; the taxation of the country still further increased. The great lords, and some other people, will have become still more powerful, unless the freemen and electors of Durham and of other places stand to their guns, and resolve that, whatever may come of Queen, or Lords, or Commons, or Church, or anybody—great and powerful, and noble though they be—the working classes will stand by the working classes; and will no longer lay themselves down in the dust to be trampled upon by the iron heel of monopoly, and have their very lives squeezed out of them by evils such as I have described."

"Going into the House last night, the caution lately given me by a poor but honest Scotchman struck me. He said to me, "Mr. Bright, I'll give you a piece of advice. You are going into bad company; and now that you are in, remember that you stick to what you said when you were out." If one had dropped from the clouds upon the floor of the House and listened to the debate last night, I never should have dreamed that there was the least distress or discontent in the country. It was true that Lord John Russell made a very clever speech and some hard hits at the ministry...Then came Lord Palmerston, and he made a very clever speech, if there was no country; it would have been very well at a debating club; it had some hard cuts at the ministry, interspersed with references to Afghanistan and the Ameers of Scinde, and everything but the condition of England question."

"The preservation of game involves a list of evils to the farmer of which the loss of money is probably not the greatest. It destroys his self-respect and the independence of his character. He takes a farm and contracts to pay a rent; he stocks it with cattle and sheep; he ploughs and sows and reaps—his landlord also stocks the same farm with hares and rabbits and pheasants, and enjoys his battue, or sends to market the game which his tenant's produce has fed. The tenant has his servants, to superintend or conduct the operations on his farm, and to feed and protect his cattle and his flocks—the landlord has his keepers to secure his game, and these keepers are a spy upon the tenant himself, and traverse his field by day or night, as though superior to his servants and himself. In all this there is a fruitful source of depredation to the farmer. Men of capital and independent feeling will shun an occupation which involves so much humiliation."

"Does Irish discontent arise because the priests of Maynooth are now insufficiently clad or fed? I have always thought that it arose because one-third of the people were paupers. I can easily see how, by the granting of this sum, you might hear far less in future times of the sufferings and wrongs of the people of Ireland than you have heard heretofore. For you find that one large means of influence possessed by those who have agitated for the redress of Irish wrongs is the support which the Irish Catholic clergy have given to the various associations for carrying on political agitation. And the object of this Bill is to tame down these agitators—it is a sop given to the priests. It is hush-money, given that they may not proclaim to the whole country, to Europe and to the world, the sufferings of the population to whom they administer the rites and the consolations of religion."

"I take it that the Protestant Church of Ireland is at the root of the evils of that country. The Irish Catholics would thank us infinitely more if we were to wipe away that foul blot than they would even if Parliament were to establish the Roman Catholic Church alongside of it. They have had everything Protestant—a Protestant clique which has been dominant in the country; a Protestant Viceroy to distribute places and emoluments amongst that Protestant clique; Protestant judges who have polluted the seats of justice; Protestant magistrates before whom the Catholic peasant cannot hope for justice; they have not only Protestant but exterminating landlords, and more than that a Protestant soldiery, who at the beck and command of a Protestant priest, have butchered and killed a Catholic peasant even in the presence of his widowed mother. The consequence of all this is the extreme discontent of the Irish people. And because this House is not prepared yet to take those measures which would be really doing justice to Ireland, your object is to take away the sympathy of the Catholic priests from the people. The object is to make the priests in Ireland as tame as those in Suffolk and Dorsetshire. The object is that when the horizon is brightened every night by incendiary fires, no priest of the paid establishment shall ever tell of the wrongs of the people among whom he is living...Ireland is suffering, not from the want of another Church, but because she has already one Church too many."

"Notwithstanding the hope that my friend [Cobden], who has just addressed you, has expressed, that it may not become a war of classes, I am not sure that it has not already become such, and I doubt whether it can have any other character. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and great proprietors of the soil...Since the time when we first came to London to ask the attention of Parliament to the question of the Corn Law, two millions of human beings have been added to the population of the United Kingdom...I see them now in my mind's eye ranged before me, old men and young children, all looking to the Government for bread; some endeavouring to resist the stroke of famine, clamorous and turbulent, but still arguing with us; some dying mute and uncomplaining. Multitudes have died of hunger in the United Kingdom since we first asked the Government to repeal the Corn Law, and although the great and powerful may not regard those who suffer mutely and die in silence, yet the recording angel will note down their patient endurance and the heavy guilt of those by whom they have been sacrificed..."

"We have had landlord rule longer, far longer than the life of the oldest man in this vast assembly, and I would ask you to look at the results of that rule. The landowners have had unlimited sway in Parliament and in the provinces. Abroad the history of our country is the history of war and rapine: at home, of debt, taxes, and rapine too. In all the great contests in which we have been engaged we have found that this ruling class have taken all the honours, while the people have taken all the scars. No sooner was the country freed from the horrible contest which was so long carried on with the Powers of Europe, than this law, by their partial legislation, was enacted—far more hostile to British interests than any combination of foreign powers has ever proved. We find them legislating corruptly: they pray daily that in their legislation they may discard all private ends and partial affections, and after prayers they sit down to make a law for the purpose of extorting from all the consumers of food a higher price than it is worth, that the extra price may find its way into the pockets of the proprietors of land, these proprietors being the very men by whom this infamous law is sustained..."

"Two centuries ago the people of this country were engaged in a fearful conflict with the Crown. A despotic and treacherous monarch assumed to himself the right to levy taxes without the consent of Parliament and the people. That assumption was resisted. This fair island became a battlefield, the kingdom was convulsed, and an ancient throne overturned. And if our forefathers, two hundred years ago, resisted that attempt—if they refused to be the bondmen of a king—shall we be the born thralls of an aristocracy like ours? Shall we, who struck the lion down—shall we pay the wolf homage? Or shall we not, by a manly and united expression of public opinion, at once, and for ever, put an end to this giant wrong?"

"Peel delivered the best speech I ever heard in Parliament. It was truly a magnificent speech, sustained throughout, thoroughly with us, and offering even to pass the immediate [repeal of the Corn Laws], if the House are willing. Villiers, Gibson, and myself cheered continually, and I never listened to any human being speaking in public with so much delight."

"You say the right hon. baronet [Peel] is a traitor. It would ill become me to attempt his defence after the speech which he delivered last night—a speech, I will venture to say, more powerful and more to be admired than any speech which has been delivered within the memory of any man in this House. I watched the right hon. baronet as he went home last night, and for the first time I envied him his feelings. That speech was circulated by scores of thousands throughout the kingdom and throughout the world; and wherever a man is to be found who loves justice, and wherever there is a labourer whom you have trampled under foot, that speech will bring joy to the heart of the one, and hope to the breast of the other. You chose the right hon. baronet—why? Because he was the ablest man of your party. You always said so, and you will not deny it now. Why was he the ablest? Because he had great experience, profound attainments, and an honest regard for the good of the country. You placed him in office. When a man is in office he is not the same man as when in opposition. The present generation, or posterity, does not deal as mildly with men in government as with those in opposition. There are such things as the responsibilities of office. Look at the population of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and there is not a man among you who would have the valour to take office and raise the standard of Protection, and cry, "Down with the Anti-Corn Law League, and Protection for ever!" There is not a man in your ranks who would dare to sit on that bench as the Prime Minister of England pledged to maintain the existing law. The right hon. baronet took the only, the truest course—he resigned. He told you by that act: "I will no longer do your work. I will not defend your cause. The experience I have had since I came into office renders it impossible for me at once to maintain office and the Corn Laws." The right hon. baronet resigned—he was then no longer your Minister. He came back to office as the Minister of his Sovereign and of the people."

"We have taught the people of this country the value of a great principle. They have learned that there is nothing that can be held out to the intelligent people of this kingdom so calculated to stimulate them to action, and to great and persevering action, as a great and sacred principle like that which the League has espoused. They have learned that there is in public opinion a power much greater than that residing in any particular form of government; that although you have in this kingdom a system of government which is called "popular" and "representative"—a system which is somewhat clumsily contrived, and which works with many jars and joltings—that still, under the impulse of a great principle, with great labour and with great sacrifices, all those obstacles are overcome, so that out of a machine especially contrived for the contrary, justice and freedom are at length achieved for the nation; and the people have learned something beyond this—that is, that the way to freedom is henceforward not through violence and bloodshed."

"Liberty is on the march, and this year promises to be a great year in European history. Our Government is blind enough, and the Parliamentary majorities are more regarded than opinion out of doors. We must have another League of some kind, and our aristocracy must be made to submit again."

"In this country political agitation is not likely to be soon lulled. We shall have no violence, I think, except in Ireland, and even there I hope appearances are rather less threatening than were supposed a short time ago. But we shall have, and ought to have, a powerful agitation in favour of a real Parliamentary Reform, and to gain this would be worth some time longer of commercial depression. We have deluded ourselves with the notion that we are a free people, and have a good government and a representative system, whilst in fact our representative system is for the most part a sham, and the forms of representation are used to consolidate the supremacy of the titled and proprietary class. All this will break down by and by. From all parts of the country we hear of preliminary meetings and new organisations, Associations and Leagues, etc. The middle and working classes are beginning to see that united they may win all they require; divided they are a prey to their insatiable enemies."

"The real difficulties which beset this question, do not arise from anything in Ireland, so much as from the constitution of the Government. This House, and the other House of Parliament, are almost exclusively aristocratic in their character. The Administration is therefore necessarily the same, and on the Treasury benches aristocracy reigns supreme. Not fewer than seven Members of the Cabinet are Members of the House of Lords; and every other Member of it is either a Lord by title, or on the very threshold of the peerage by birth or marriage. I am not blaming them for this; it may even be that from neither House of Parliament can fourteen better men be chosen to fill their places. But I maintain that in the present position of Ireland, and looking at human nature as it is, it is not possible that fourteen Gentlemen, circumstanced as these are, can meet round the Council table, and with unbiassed minds fairly discuss the question of Ireland, as it now presents itself to this House, to the country, and to the world."

"Why cannot the Irish get and save money in Ireland? And why must they cross the Atlantic before they can get hold of a piece of land? Our "territorial" system is one which works a wide and silent cruelty, beggaring, demoralising and destroying multitudes of our people. I should like to join a League sworn or pledged to its entire overthrow. There are facts enough afloat that would suffice to make a revolution in opinion with regard to it, and it follows logically on the Free Trade movement."

"We see sad scenes by the wayside, small and wretched hovels in quarries and nooks of the roads in which some wretched family finds shelter. The children leave an impression of misery on the mind which can never be effaced. Houses unroofed and lands waste and de-populated, are the memorials of the frightful calamities through which the country has passed. The proprietors are nearly all bankrupt, great numbers of the farmers are gone away, thousands of the peasantry are in the work-houses or in their graves. I believe we can form no fair idea of what has passed in these districts within the last four years, and I see no great prospect of a solid improvement. Here we have in perfection the fruits of aristocratic and territorial usurpation and privileges."

"The question at issue in the late debate was mainly this: Shall the Foreign Minister of this country be permitted to interfere in the affairs of other countries in cases where the direct interests of this country do not require it? Shall he advise, and warn, and meddle in matters which concern only the domestic and internal affairs of other countries? I say that such a policy necessarily leads to irritation, and to quarrels with other nations, and may lead even to war; and that it involves the necessity of maintaining greater armaments, and a heavier expenditure and taxation than would otherwise be required. It is a policy, therefore, which I cannot support under any pretence whatever."

"In the Cabinet there were large Irish proprietors, and, without imputing to any proprietor a desire of doing injustice to his tenants, it was easy to understand that after the long continuance of the present state of the law in Ireland, proprietors were alarmed at any proposition coming to them like the Bill of the hon. Member for Rochdale. The Irish proprietors in the Cabinet, in that House, and out of it, were afraid of a Bill that would interfere with the powers and privileges that a Parliament of landowners for generations past had been conferring upon the proprietors of the soil. That was the point. The question was, could the cats wisely and judiciously legislate for the mice? He did not believe it. He was as much opposed as any man could be to transferring the land from the landlord to the tenant; but a measure of justice was due from the former to the latter, both in Ireland and in this country as well."

"At present no Government dare say a word to the Church—that overgrown and monstrous abuse assumes airs as if it were not an abuse. It is a wen upon the head and pretends to be the head, and no administration is strong enough to say a word against it. With 14,000 Dissenting Chapels in England and Wales, with two-thirds of Scotland in dissenting ranks, with five-sixths of Ireland hostile to the Church, how comes it that this scandalous abuse puts on the character of a national and useful institution? Simply because it has the Crown and the Peers on its side by tradition and the constitution, and has gained great power in the Commons thro' our defective representation. Let the representation be amended, and then the Church will be more humble, and will submit, of necessity, to be overhauled as one of the departments of the State."

"The Romans were great conquerors, but where they conquered, they governed wisely. The nations they conquered were impressed so indelibly with the intellectual character of their masters, that, after fourteen centuries of decadence, the traces of civilisation were still distinguishable. Why should not we act a similar part in India? There never was a more docile people, never a more tractable nation. The opportunity was present, and the power was not wanting. Let us abandon the policy of aggression, and confine ourselves to a territory ten times the size of France, with a population four times as numerous as that of the United Kingdom. Surely that was enough to satisfy the most gluttonous appetite for glory and supremacy. Educate the people of India, and govern them wisely, and gradually the distinctions of caste would disappear, and they would look upon us rather as benefactors than as conquerors. And if we desired to see Christianity, in some form, professed in that country, we should sooner attain our object by setting the example of a high-toned Christian morality, than by any other means we could employ."

"The division of the land is the grand source of the property and wealth of France...probably no other country has made such strides in increasing wealth and comfort as France has since 1790."

"We shall almost be hooted down in the House, I expect, for the Tories are for war, partly because the Government has been supposed to be for peace. And if war begins, then nine-tenths of the men on our side will back the Government and shout even more vociferously than the Tories. Losing a Reform Bill and gaining a war. I don't see how we could be worse placed. Though the end may show that we are now right, yet the end is not yet, and in the meantime we shall have much to suffer and much to despond about. How men can prefer the certain and enormous evils of a war, to the dim and vague prospect of remote injury from Russian aggrandisement, is beyond my understanding. The nation seems little wiser than in 1793 and we may soon be as unpopular as Fox was, and yet be as much right as he was. I feel rather sick of public life, and indeed of the follies of my country."

"This old aristocracy and Church-ridden, and tradition-ridden country will never grow wiser. Whilst we are fighting for supremacy in Europe the [United] States are working, and not fighting for it, but winning it all over the world."

"The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the two sideposts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on; he takes his victims from the castle of the noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage of the poor and the lowly, and it is on behalf of all these classes that I make this solemn appeal."

"I am not working for failure, but for success, and for a real gain, and I must go the way to get it. I am sure the putting manhood suffrage in the Bill is not the way to get it. This has been done by the Chartists, and by the Complete Suffragists, but what has become of their Bills?"

"[H]is (Mr. Bright's) own opinions had always been very adverse to maintaining an armed squadron for the suppression of the slave trade."

"I do not now make any comment upon the mode in which this country has been put into possession of India. I accept that possession as a fact. There we are; we do not know how to leave it, and therefore let us see if we know how to govern it. It is a problem such as, perhaps, no other nation has had to solve. Let us see whether there is enough of intelligence and virtue in England to solve the difficulty. In the first place, then, I say, let us abandon all that system of calumny against the Natives of India which has lately prevailed. Had that people not been docile, the most governable race in the world, how could you have maintained your power for 100 years? Are they not industrious, are they not intelligent, are they not—upon the evidence of the most distinguished men the Indian Service ever produced—endowed with many qualities which make them respected by all Englishmen who mix with them? I have heard that from many men of the widest experience, and have read the same in the works of some of the best writers upon India. Then let us not have these constant calumnies against such a people."

"They say we must not on any account "Americanise" our institutions...They tell us in America numbers overwhelm property and education. Well, but numbers have not overwhelmed property and education in England, and yet look at legislation in England. Look at our wars, look at our debt, look at our taxes, look at this great fact—that every improvement of the last forty years has been an improvement which numbers, and numbers only, have wrested from the property, and what they call the education of the country. Our education is fairly represented by our Universities, but I say now, as I have said before, that if the Legislature of England, if the Parliament of England, had been guided for thirty years past according to the counsels of the representatives from the Universities, England, instead of being a country of law and of order, would have been long before this a country of anarchy and of revolution."

"Shall we then, I ask you, even for a moment, be hopeless of our great cause? I feel almost ashamed even to argue it to such a meeting as this. I call to mind where I am, and who are those whom I see before me. Am I not in the town of Birmingham—England's central capital; and do not these eyes look upon the sons of those who, not thirty years ago, shook the fabric of privilege to its base? Not a few of the strong men of that time are now white with age. They approach the confines of their mortal day. Its evening is cheered with the remembrance of that great contest, and they rejoice in the freedom they have won. Shall their sons be less noble than they? Shall the fire which they kindled be extinguished with you? I see your answer in every face. You are resolved that the legacy which they bequeathed to you, you will hand down in an accumulated wealth of freedom to your children. As for me, my voice is feeble. I feel now sensibly and painfully that I am not what I was. I speak with diminished fire; I act with a lessened force; but as I am, my countrymen and my constituents, I will, if you will let me, be found in your ranks in the impending struggle."

"This excessive love for "the balance of power" is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain."

"I believe there is no permanent greatness to a nation except it be based upon morality. I do not care for military greatness or military renown. I care for the condition of the people among whom I live. There is no man in England who is less likely to speak irreverently of the Crown and Monarchy of England than I am; but crowns, coronets, mitres, military display, the pomp of war, wide colonies, and a huge Empire, are, in my view, all trifles light as air, and not worth considering, unless with them you can have a fair share of comfort, contentment, and happiness among the great body of the people. Palaces, baronial castles, great halls, stately mansions, do not make a nation. The nation in every country dwells in the cottage; and unless the light of your constitution can shine there, unless the beauty of your legislation and the excellence of your statesmanship are impressed there on the feelings and condition of the people, rely upon it you have yet to learn the duties of Government."

"The moral law was not written for men alone in their individual character, but it was written as well for nations, and for nations great as this of which we are citizens. If nations reject and deride that moral law, there is a penalty which will inevitably follow. It may not come at once, it may not come in our lifetime; but, rely upon it, the great Italian is not a poet only, but a prophet, when he says: "The sword of heaven is not in haste to smite, Nor yet doth linger.""

"I have often compared, in my own mind, the people of England with the people of ancient Egypt, and the Foreign Office of this country with the temples of the Egyptians. We are told by those who pass up and down the Nile that on its banks are grand temples with stately statues and massive and lofty columns, statues each one of which would have appeared almost to have exhausted a quarry in its production. You have, further, vast chambers and gloomy passages; and some innermost recess, some holy of holies, in which, when you arrive at it, you find some loathsome reptile which a nation reverenced and revered, and bowed itself down to worship. In our Foreign Office we have no massive columns; we have no statues; but we have a mystery as profound; and in the innermost recesses of it we find some miserable intrigue, in defence of which your fleets are traversing every ocean, your armies are perishing in every clime, and the precious blood of our country's children is squandered as though it had no price. I hope that an improved representation will change all this; that the great portion of our expenditure which is incurred in carrying out the secret and irresponsible doings of our Foreign Office will be placed directly under the free control of a Parliament elected by the great body of the people of the United Kingdom."

"I think we are bound as free men—and we townsmen are especially bound, for we only have the power to take the initiative in this great question—we are bound, so far as we are able, by our representatives in Parliament (and I have no doubt it will be one of the consequences of a real Reform Bill), to apply those great principles of political economy, which are the gospel and the charter of industry, as fully to property in land as we have already applied them to property engaged in trade."

"I am for "peace, retrenchment, and reform" — the watchword of the great Liberal party 30 years ago. Whosoever may abandon the cause I shall never pronounce another Shibboleth, but as long as the old flag floats in the air I shall be found a steadfast soldier in the foremost ranks"

"I have never uttered a word in favour of universal suffrage either in this House or elsewhere."

"I ask every Gentleman...whether it is possible that you can continue to raise from the people of this country £60,000,000 sterling per annum of taxes more than an equal population is called upon to pay for its Government and its policy in the United States, and that we can go on with safety to our institutions, or that the people can hear the strain of that enormous pressure? ... [T]his insane and wicked policy, which requires that you should abstract from the labour and the industry of the people of England this enormous, incredible, and ruinous sum from year to year. ... You will have an exiled Royal family—you will have an overthrown aristocracy—and you will have a period of recurring revolution; and there is no path so straight, so downward, so slippery, so easily travelled to all these misfortunes as the path which we are now following, year after year adding to these enormous expenses until the time will come when there will be some change throughout the country, when men will open their eyes, will ask who has deceived them, defrauded them, pillaged them. And then you will have to pay the penalty which all men in the upper classes of society in every country have had to pay when they have not maintained the rights of the great body of the people in this particular, and when they have not fulfilled the duties which devolved upon them as the governing classes of the country."

"If the middle class prefer an alliance with the aristocratic or ruling party, to the cordial co-operation and help of the great nation now excluded from the franchise and from all political power, they must be content with a profligate government expenditure, and a taxation burdensome from its amount, and insulting from its inequality and injustice."

"I have been asked twenty, fifty times during the last twelve months, “Why do you not come out and say something? Why can you not tell us something in this time of our great need?” Well, I reply, “I told you something when speaking was of use; all I can say now is this, or nearly all, that a hundred years of crime against the negro in America, and a hundred years of crime against the docile natives of our Indian empire, are not to be washed away by the penitence and the suffering of an hour.”"

"Now, take as an illustration the Rock of Gibraltar. Many of you have been there, I dare say. I have; and among the things that interested me were the monkeys on the top of it, and a good many people at the bottom, who were living on English taxes. Well, the Rock of Gibraltar was taken and retained when we were not at war with Spain, and it was retained contrary to every law of morality and honour."

"We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments."

"The Aristocracy in this country are almost, and really are altogether on one side – because they have special privileges to sustain, to surrender which would make them no longer an aristocracy. Our government was purely an aristocratic one from 1690 to 1830. Nearly the whole period was one of war, and war wholly needless."

"The right hon. Gentleman is the first of the new party who has expressed his great grief by his actions—who has retired into what may be called his political Cave of Adullam—and he has called about him every one that was in distress and every one that was discontented."

"[The opposition to the Reform Bill of 1866 was directed] against the admission of any portion of the working men to the suffrage. The Tory party, and those from the Liberal ranks who join it, are animated by an unchangeable hostility to any Bill which gives the franchise to the working men. They object to any transfer of power from those who now possess it, and they object to share their power with any increased number of their countrymen who form the working class. They regard the workmen here as the southern planter regards the negroes who were so lately his slaves. They can no longer be bought or sold; so far they are free men. They may work and pay taxes; but they must not vote. They must obey the laws, but must have no share in selecting the men who are to make them. The future position of the millions of working men in the United Kingdom is now determined, if the opposition of the Tory party is to prevail—it is precisely that fixed by the southern planter for the negro. Millions of workmen will bear this in mind; they will now know the point or the gulf which separates one party from the other in the House of Commons."

"I am the great terror of the squires, they seem to be seized with a sort of bucolic mania in dealing with me."

"Working men in this hall...I...say to you, and through the Press to all the working men of this kingdom, that the accession to office of Lord Derby is a declaration of war against the working classes...They reckon nothing of the Constitution of their country—a Constitution which has not more regard to the Crown or to the aristocracy than it has to the people; a Constitution which regards the House of Commons fairly representing the nation as important a part of the Government system of the kingdom as the House of Lords or the Throne itself...Now, what is the Derby principle? It is the shutting out of much more than three-fourths, five-sixths, and even more than five-sixths, of the people from the exercise of constitutional rights...What is it that we are come to in this country that what is being rapidly conceded in all parts of the world is being persistently and obstinately refused here in England, the home of freedom, the mother of Parliaments...Stretch out your hand to your countrymen in every portion of the three kingdoms, and ask them to join in a great and righteous effort on behalf of that freedom which has so long been the boast of Englishmen, but which the majority of Englishmen have never yet possessed...Remember the great object for which we strive, care not for calumnies and for lies, our object is this—to restore the British Constitution and with all its freedom to the British people."

"I believe the time is coming when this question must be laid hold of by a Government, and that Parliament will feel that it dare not treat it in future as it has treated it in the past. These great meetings, as Mr. Mill very justly said, were not meetings so much for discussion as they were meetings for demonstration of opinion, and, if you like, I will add for exhibition of force. (Cheers.) Such exhibitions, if they be despised and disregarded may become exhibitions of another kind of force...I have been insulted in past times...that I was in favour of peace at any price...I believe that however much any of us may abhor the thought that political questions in any country should ever again be settled by force, yet there is something in the constitution of our nature that when these evils are allowed to run on beyond a certain period unredressed, that the most peace-loving of men are unable to keep the peace. (Hear, hear.) And bear this in mind,—that, however much we may wish political questions to be settled by moral means, yet it is no more immoral for a people to use force in the last resort for the obtaining and the securing of freedom than it is for a Government by force to suppress and deny that freedom. (Loud cheers, the audience rising.)"

"What are the results of this system of legislation? Some of them have been touched upon in that Address which has been so kindly presented to me. You refer to the laws affecting land. Are you aware that half the land of England is in the possession of fewer than one hundred and fifty men? Are you aware of the fact that half the land in Scotland is in the possession of not more than ten or twelve men? Are you aware of the fact that the monopoly in land in the United Kingdom is growing constantly more and more close? And the result of it is this — the gradual extirpation of the middle class as owners of land, and the constant degradation of the tillers of the soil."

"[H]e asked why in Ireland they should tolerate the law of primogeniture and the system of entails? He would go further still, and deal with the question of absenteeism. He proposed that a Parliamentary Commission should be empowered to treat for the purchase of large estates belonging to the English nobility, with a view of selling them to the tenantry of Ireland. ‘Now, here are some of them: the present Prime Minister, Lord Derby, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Hertford, the Marquis of Bath, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Devonshire, and many others. They have estates in Ireland; many of them, I dare say, are just as well managed as any other estates in the country; but what you want is to restore to Ireland a middle-class proprietary of the soil; and I venture to say that if these estates could be purchased and could be sold out farm by farm to the tenant occupiers in Ireland, that it would be infinitely better, in a conservative sense, than that they should belong to great proprietors living out of the country.’"

"The Aristocratic Institutions of England [had] acted much like the Slavery Institutions of America...[in] demoralis[ing] large classes outside their own special boundaries...[in producing] a long habit of submission...[and in] enfeebl[ing] by corrupting those who should assail them."

"He...made observations with regard to the Queen, which, in my opinion, no meeting of people in this country, and certainly no meeting of Reformers, ought to have listened to with approbation. (Cheers.) Let it be remembered that there has been no occasion on which any Ministry has proposed an improved representation of the people when the Queen has not given her cordial, unhesitating, and, I believe, hearty assent. (Cheers.) ... But Mr. Ayrton referred further to a supposed absorption of the sympathies of the Queen with her late husband to the exclusion of sympathy for and with the people. (Hear, hear.) I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are possessors of crowns. (Hear, hear.) But I could not sit here and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. (Loud cheers.) I think there has been by many persons a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. (Cheers.) And I venture to say this, that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)"

"I do not think, as some persons seem to think, that the land is really only intended to be in the hands of the rich. I think that is a great mistake. I am not speaking of the poor—for the poor man, in the ordinary meaning of the term, cannot be the possessor of land; but it cannot be a crime or an evil that any man of moderate means, any farmer, should, if he could, become the possessor of land or of his farm."

"Since I have taken a part in public affairs, the fact of the vast weight of the poverty and ignorance that exists at the bottom of the social scale has been a burden on my mind, and is so now. I have always hoped that the policy which I have advocated, and has been accepted in principle, will tend gradually but greatly to relieve the pauperism and the suffering which we still see among the working classes of society."

"Ireland is never unanimous but on one thing – getting something from the Imperial Exchequer."

"To have two Legislative Assemblies in the United Kingdom would, in my opinion, be an intolerable mischief; and I think no sensible man can wish for two within the limits of the present United Kingdom who does not wish the United Kingdom to become two or more nations, entirely separate from each other."

"They [the Conservatives] say that we—that is, the Liberal party—have disturbed classes and interests unnecessarily, that we have harassed almost all sorts of people, and have made ourselves very unpopular thereby. Without doubt, if they had been in the Wilderness, they would have condemned the Ten Commandments as a harassing piece of legislation, though it does happen that we have the evidence of more than thirty centuries to the wisdom and usefulness of those Commandments."

"Tell the merchant that he must not rely for one moment on the Home Rulers for any one thing that is wise and good, nor indeed on any political combination of Irishmen. They have never yet done anything for themselves or their country and have never yet as a party shown what ought to be done. The absence of political and economical knowledge in Ireland is remarkable, and what there is of a sensible middle class is apparently crushed or smothered by the extreme men, who are always in pursuit of some phantom and who seem not to know the substance even when they see it."

"The public exactions and expenditure have much to do with poverty. To raise not less than eighty millions sterling per annum for purposes of government, to expend thirty millions of it in military preparations and means of offence and defence, the bulk of which is only rendered apparently necessary by a mistaken foreign policy, must act as a burden on the people, and must press multitudes of prudent and virtuous families to poverty."

"There is no nation on the Continent of Europe that is less able to do harm to England, and there is no nation on the Continent of Europe to whom we are less able to do harm than we are to Russia. We are so separated that it seems impossible that the two nations, by the use of reason or common sense at all, could possibly be brought into conflict with each other."

"It is not Bradlaugh's atheism which they hate, but his unconscious Christianity."

"Force is not a remedy."

"I think in reviewing the doctrines connected with our Foreign policy which I have preached and defended during 40 years of my public life, you will not be surprised at the decision I am now compelled to take. I cannot accept any share of the responsibility for the acts of war which have taken place at Alexandria. I cannot see to what they may lead, and I know not to what greater wrong and mischief they may force the Government. I feel therefore compelled to withdraw from the Administration, and to ask you to place my resignation of the office I hold in the hands of the Queen. I bitterly lament the disappointment of many hopes as I separate myself from your Government. My feelings towards yourself are those of profound esteem and regard, and an overpowering sense of duty has alone forced me to the only course which seems now open to me. To add to your difficulties and to give you trouble is a cause of much unhappiness to me. I can only hope you will be able to judge me rightly and to forgive me."

"What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times."

"[W]hat more a blessing, than in these years of feebleness—may be sometimes of suffering—it must be often of solitude—if there be the power to derive instruction and amusement and refreshment from books which your great library will offer to every one? (Applause.) To the young especially this is of great importance, for if there be no seed-time there will certainly be no harvest, and the youth of life is the seed-time of life."

"The task of the wise government of so vast an empire may be an impossible one—I often fear it is so—we may fail in our efforts, but, whether we fail or succeed, let us do our best to compensate for the wrong of the past and the present by conferring on the Indian people whatever good it is in our power to give them."

"The fact is that the abolition of the corn laws which allowed the importation of wheat from every part of the world whence it can be grown cheaper and sent here and the unhappy pressure of the last few years' bad harvests have broken down the landed system of England and no power on earth can set it up again. (Hear, hear). What I want with regard to the land system is not many or any new fangled propositions. What I want is that we should at first remove all the obstructions which the present law puts in the way of the easy transfer and the division of land."

"[Gladstone] gave me a long memorandum, historical in character, on the past Irish story, which seemed to be somewhat one-sided, leaving out of view the important minority and the views and feelings of the Protestant and loyal portion of the people. He explained much of his policy as to a Dublin Parliament, and as to Land purchase. I objected to the Land policy as unnecessary—the Act of 1881 had done all that was reasonable for the tenants—why adopt the policy of the rebel party, and get rid of landholders, and thus evict the English garrison as the rebels call them? I denied the value of the security for repayment. Mr G. argued that his finance arrangements would be better than present system of purchase, and that we were bound in honour to succour the landlords, which I contested. Why not go to the help of other interests in Belfast and Dublin? As to Dublin Parliament, I argued that he was making a surrender all along the line—a Dublin Parliament would work with constant friction, and would press against any barrier he might create to keep up the unity of the three Kingdoms. What of a volunteer force, and what of import duties and protection as against British goods? … I thought he placed far too much confidence in the leaders of the rebel party. I could place none in them, and the general feeling was and is that any terms made with them would not be kept, and that through them I could not hope for reconciliation with discontented and disloyal Ireland."

"I feel outside all the contending sections of the liberal party — for I am not in favour of home rule, or the creation of a Dublin parliament...I cannot consent to a measure which is so offensive to the whole protestant population of Ireland, and to the whole sentiment of the province of Ulster so far as its loyal and protestant people are concerned. I cannot agree to exclude them from the protection of the imperial parliament. ...In any case of a division, it is I suppose certain that a considerable majority of British members will oppose the bill. Thus, whilst it will have the support of the rebel members, it will be opposed by a majority from Great Britain and by a most hostile vote from all that is loyal in Ireland. The result will be, if a majority supports you it will be one composed in effect of the men who for six years past have insulted the Queen, have torn down the national flag, have declared your lord lieutenant guilty of deliberate murder, and have made the imperial parliament an assembly totally unable to manage the legislative business for which it annually assembles at Westminster."

"Clarendon met the eminent demagogue in the street about this time, and described wonderingly to Kathy “his insolent and swaggering way of saying that he and Lords like himself [Clarendon] had no idea of the extent of Reform which they would be obliged to swallow, and other radical speeches which Clarendon seems to have answered with contempt and spirit, and felt an almost unconquerable desire to give him a good thrashing, which he felt he could do, and would have liked intensely.”"

"[T]he real clue to his power lay in the personality and moral attributes of the man, and in the nature of the causes for which he pleaded. Though it is no part of the business of an orator to mount a pulpit, John Bright preached to his countrymen with the fervour of a Savonarola and the simplicity of a Wesley. Many of his illustrations (e.g. the Shunammite woman and the cave of Adullam) were drawn from the Bible, which he was said to know better than any other book. In general literature he was not deeply versed, nor did he give any evidence of a wide knowledge or profound reasoning. There can never have been any speaker who more successfully practised the maxim Ars est celare artem. Though he was known to shut himself up for days before he delivered a great speech, when he was inaccessible even to his family, though his purple passages, as they would now be called, were committed to memory and his perorations written down, neither his manner nor his diction suggested artifice, while his high character and patent sincerity opened the door of every heart."

"Bright was a great contrast to Cobden. A more powerful speaker—but not so persuasive. Even when right, he often injured his cause by his want of the faculty of conciliation. Bright was a natural & powerful orator. He was Demosthenic. He had imagination & a glowing soul... Bright, brought up in the most dreadful prejudices, which he fancied were liberal opinions, & apt to offend & outrage, was however always learning, & beneath his apparent vindictiveness & fierceness was a good-hearted man."

"I ought to name a deputation of a demonstrative character on account of one who formed part of it. It was received not by me but by Lord Ripon, in the large room at the Board of Trade, I being present. A long line of fifteen or twenty gentlemen from the Lancashire district occupied benches running down and at the end of the room, and presented a formidable appearance. All however that I remember is the figure of a person in (I think) black or dark Quaker costume, seemingly the youngest of the band. Eagerly he sat a little forward on the bench, and intervened in the discussion... I was greatly struck with him. He seemed to me rather fierce, but very strong and very earnest. I need hardly say this was John Bright. A year or two after he made his appearance in parliament."

"No one was equal to Bright when he had time to prepare a subject. But he was not strong as a debater, though I once remember his being very successful in debate."

"I will say that there were certain passages in Bright's speeches which I never heard equalled."

"John Bright, to whom Mr. Gladstone used in familiar terms occasionally to refer as "honest John." The "grand moral tone" which characterised Bright's sayings and doings, his high principle, the consistency of his public career and solidarity of his character, appealed with special force to Mr. Gladstone; and acutely as he felt breaches of political friendship, there was no one with whom he parted company with a heavier heart than John Bright when he left the government in 1882, and again when he felt unable to support the policy which was enunciated for Ireland in 1886."

"As a man Mr. Bright put Christianity in the first place as a personal influence—as a politician he regarded it chiefly as a public force to be appealed to on behalf of social welfare. What he hated was injustice; what he abhorred was cruelty, whether of war or slavery; what he cared for was the comfort and prosperity of common people. Whatever stood in the way of these things he would withstand, whether the opposing forces were spiritual principalities, or peers, or thrones."

"He embodied some of the best qualities of the race. His eloquence moved men to the depths of their nature because it was instinct with the loftiest purpose, with that moral seriousness which is conspicuous in the English character even to excess. But no trace of cant marked the words and thoughts of John Bright. Everything he said came from the very heart of the man. His Liberalism was a creed that appealed to everything that was noble in humanity: it was animated by great ideals; it had no hint of opportunism, of materialism... He stood for justice in all things, and his whole political life was a long struggle against the inequalities around him. Almost alone of English statesmen, he sided with the American Federals from the very first."

"I was at the Hyde Park Franchise demonstration, when a large meeting of Socialists was held after the political one was over, at which John Burns referred to Bright as a silver-tongued hypocrite. This was enough for the radicals of that day; our banners and platform were torn and broken up, and some of us were being run to the Serpentine for a ducking."

"A political leader does well to strive to keep our democracy historic. John Bright would have been a worthy comrade of John Hampden, John Selden and John Pym. He had the very spirit of the Puritan leaders. He had their brave and honest heart, their sound and steady judgment, their manly hatred of oppression, of bad laws and bad government; and besides that, it was true of Bright as was said of John Pym that "he had the civic temper and the habit of looking for wisdom as the result of common debate." It was that which made him glory in the House of Commons. No man so profoundly honoured the great possibilities of the Mother of Parliaments."

"Now, Sir, I happen to be of opinion that there are things for which peace may be advantageously sacrificed, and that there are calamities which a nation may endure which are far worse than war... The hon. Member, however, reduces everything to the question of pounds, shillings, and pence, and I verily believe that if this country were threatened with an immediate invasion likely to end in its conquest, the hon. Member would sit down, take a piece of paper, and would put on one side of the account the contributions which his Government would require from him for the defence of the liberty and independence of the country, and he would put on the other the probable contributions which the general of the invading army might levy upon Manchester, and if he found that, on balancing the account, it would be cheaper to be conquered than to be laid under contribution for defence, he would give his vote against going to war for the liberties and independence of the country, rather than bear his share in the expenditure which it would entail."

"In the first place, he was the greatest master of English oratory that this generation has produced, or I may perhaps say several generations back. I have met men who have heard Pitt and Fox, and in whose judgment their eloquence at its best was inferior to the finest efforts of John Bright. At a time when much speaking has depressed and almost exterminated eloquence, he maintained robust and intact that powerful and vigorous style of English which gave fitting expression to the burning and noble thoughts he desired to express. Another characteristic for which I think he will be famous is the singular rectitude of his motives, the singular straightness of his career. He was a keen disputant, a keen combatant; like many eager men, he had little tolerance of opposition. But his action was never guided for a single moment by any consideration of personal or party selfishness. He was inspired by nothing but the purest patriotism and benevolence from the first beginning of his public career to the hour of its close."

"Lord Lansdowne once told Charles Austin that he thought Bright, as an orator, fully equal to Charles Fox."

"There are as many Scottish roads to Socialism as there are predictions of Britain's economic doom - but most of them demand three things: a coherent plan for an extension of democracy and control in society and industry which sees every reform as a means to creating a socialist society; a harnessing of the forces for industrial and community self-management within a political movement; and a massive programme of education by the Labour Movement as a whole. Gramsci's relevance to Scotland today is in his emphasis that in a society which is both mature and complex, where the total social and economic processes are geared to maintaining the production of goods and services (and the reproduction of the conditions of production), then the transition to socialism must be made by the majority of the people themselves and a socialist society must be created within the womb of existing society and prefigured in the movements for democracy at the grass roots. Socialists must neither place their faith in an Armageddon or of capitalist collapse nor in nationalisation alone. For the Jacobin notion of a vanguard making revolution on behalf of working people relates to a backward society (and prefigures an authoritarian and bureaucratic state), then the complexity of modern society requires a far reaching movement of people and existing conditions and as a co-ordinator for the assertion of social priorities by people at a community level and control by producers at an industrial level. In such a way political power will become a synthesis of – not a substitute for – community and industrial life. This requires from the Labour Movement in Scotland today a postive commitment to creating a socialist society, a coherant strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism and a programme of immediate aims which leads out of one social order into another. Such a social reorganisation - a phased extension of public control under workers' sustained and enlarged, would in EP Thompson's words lead to "a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident.""

"Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure."

"My first rule – the golden rule – ensures that over the economic cycle the Government will borrow only to invest, and that current spending will be met from taxation."

"I said that this would be a Budget based on prudence for a purpose and that guides us also in our approach to public spending."

"Under this Government, Britain will not return to the boom and bust of the past."

"David Blunkett and I both take the same view that it is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have."

"Politics seems much less important today. When you see your young daughter smiling as she was, and moving around, it's a superb feeling."

"I'm here – but I haven't been given permission to drive."

"I understand that in the UK there have already been 10,000 complaints from viewers about these remarks, which people see, rightly, as offensive. I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance. Anything detracting from this I condemn."

"We will not return to the old boom and bust."

"I want to lead a government humble enough to know its place – where I will always strive to be – and that is on people's side."

"It is time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming few years and to make sure that people who are inactive and unemployed are able to get the new jobs on offer in our country."

"I have just accepted the invitation of Her Majesty The Queen to form a Government. This will be a new Government with new priorities and I have been privileged to have been granted the great opportunity to serve my country and at all times I will be strong in purpose, steadfast in will, resolute in action in the service of what matters to the British people, meeting the concerns and aspirations of our whole country."

"On this day I remember words that have stayed with me since my childhood and which matter a great deal to me today, my school motto: "I will try my outmost". This is my promise to all of the people of Britain and now let the work of change begin."

"I think Mrs Thatcher, Lady Thatcher, saw the need for change and I think whatever disagreements you have with her about certain policies - there was a large amount of unemployment at the time which perhaps could have been dealt with better – we have got to understand that she saw the need for change. I also admire the fact that she is a conviction politician. She stands very clearly for principles. I believe, and I have said before, that I am also a conviction politician. I am convinced about certain things, that we have got to support the talent of every individual in the country, that people have got to respect other people, that we have got to have a work ethic that works, that we have got to have discipline, as I have said, in our communities, and that is the only way with families working well and communities well, that we can do well as a country. So I am a conviction politician like her, and I think many people will see Mrs Thatcher as not only a person who saw the need for change in our country and took big decisions to achieve that, but also is and remains a conviction politician, true to the beliefs that she holds."

"56,000 companies have already benefited from the schemes that we have brought in. If we have taken the advice of the Conservative Party, no money would have been used. As Barack Obama said only yesterday, doing nothing is not an option."

"What has become clear is that Britain cannot trust the Conservatives to run the economy. Everyone knows that I'm all in favour of apprenticeships, but let me tell you this is no time for a novice."

"Good strong banks are essential for every family and for every business in the country and extraordinary times call for the bold and far-reaching solutions that the Treasury has announced today."

"We not only saved the world, er, saved the banks..."

"I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately."

"The Conservative Party always opposed the fiscal stimulus; they want to cut now the support we are giving to jobs, homes and businesses.A few days ago they said they want to tear up the 2010 budget, impose deep cuts immediately and accused us of moral cowardice for not doing so. Of course, typically of them, they called for big cuts before they called for small cuts before they called for modest cuts before they called for big cuts yet again.So their biggest claim to be the party of change is that they are the Party that keeps changing their minds."

"I agree with Nick."

"That was a disaster. Sue should never have put me with that woman... Everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour."

"Above all, I want to thank Sarah for her unwavering support as well as her love, and for her own service to our country. I thank my sons John and Fraser for the love and joy they bring to our lives. And as I leave the second most important job I could ever hold, I cherish even more the first – as a husband and father. Thank you and goodbye."

"And if you’re like me and a million more people who are convinced that the case for cooperation is greater than any case put for separation then I say to you: hold your heads high. Show dignity and pride. Be confident. Let us have confidence that our values are indeed the values of the majority of the people of Scotland. That our principles of sharing and cooperation are far better and mean more to them than separation and splitting apart."

"[It is] not British to retreat to Europe's sidelines"

"If this referendum is about anything it is about what kind of Britain we are and what kind of Britain we aspire to become. We should be a leader in Europe, not simply a member. We should not be fully out and we should not be half out. We should be fully in. We should recognise that the world has changed since the first referendum and we should be advocates for cooperation in an inter-dependent world."

"She should take no deal off the table - it's a terrible, catastrophic result to end up with a no deal and end up with businesses at risk, with trade at risk, with the supplies of health service products at risk."

"We should be a leader in Europe, not leaving it"

"Talking up no deal means renouncing the chance of a positive post-Brexit relationship with the continent and our major economic partners"

"To prevent the rise of dysfunctional nationalism, the first step is to stop no deal in its tracks"

"The problem we have is making sure that we do not inflict harm on ourselves, by leaving the EU with no deal."

"There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe."

"The next election will be a flyweight versus a heavyweight. However much the right hon. Gentleman (David Cameron) may dance around the ring beforehand, at some point, he will come within the reach of a big clunking fist."

"The House has noticed the Prime Minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks, from Stalin to Mr. Bean."

"The same harsh logic will face Gordon Brown later this week if his party is anything but convincingly ahead: The Clegg forces will not wish to bond with Labor in such a way as to prolong a discredited status quo. That would be change nobody could believe in. Even David Cameron’s Tories look fresh and uncorrupted by comparison. And it is, ultimately, as a status quo party that Labor is being defeated. Brown comes before us as a man who has spent his entire life intriguing with gnawing, neurotic energy for power for its own sake, only to find, when he attains the prize, that it doesn’t soothe his demons after all. A party with a history of radicalism, however attenuated, simply cannot afford to present itself as the party of safety first and a steady hand on the Treasury tiller."

"Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis."

"I think he is a clever man and I have a very considerable regard for him. Yes, much more than for Tony [Blair] in many ways. First of all, I think he's not as tacky as Tony. I can't see him feathering his own nest in the rather awful way in which the Blairs have done. The proverbial holidays in Tuscany with dubious people, shall we say? ... Now I don't see Gordon doing that. I think he's still too much a son of the Manse...a principled man in his personal conduct."

"According to other sources, however, Bank of England officials told those present they had “little say” about what was going to happen and that they were “doing what they were told”. This was a decision made by Brown and his inner circle, who appeared uninterested in their expert advice."

"Brown offloaded the gold at a 20-year low in the market — now nicknamed the "Brown Bottom" by dealers."

"That great dust-heap called ‘history’."

"A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love."

"It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action."

"We do not get many glimpses of Bodley's habits of life or ways of thinking, but there is no difficulty in discerning a strenuous, determined, masterful figure, bent during his later years, perhaps tyrannously bent, on effecting his object. He was not, we learn from a correspondent, 'hasty to write but when the posts do urge him, saying there need be no answer to your letters till more leisure breed him opportunity.' 'Words are women, deeds are men,' is another saying of his which I reprint without comment."

"Great is bookishness and the charm of books."

"Personally, I am dead against the burning of books."

"Oh, those scoundrelly Charity Commissioners! […] By the side of these anthropoid apes, the genuine bookworm, the paper-eating insect, ravenous as he once was, has done comparatively little mischief."

"There were no books in Eden, and there will be none in heaven."

"There are no habits of man more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the collector."

"It can never be wrong to give pleasure."

"The moment after, I began to respire 20 quarts of unmingled nitrous oxide. A thrilling, extending from the chest to the extremities, was almost immediately produced. I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees, as the pleasurable sensations increased, I last all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorised — I imagined that I made discoveries. When I was awakened from this semi-delirious trance by Dr. Kinglake, who took the bag from my mouth, indignation and pride were the first feelings produced by the sight of the persons about me. My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime; and for a minute I walked round the room, perfectly regardless of what was said to me. As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavoured to recall the ideas, they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however, presented itself: and with the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr Kinglake, "Nothing exists but thoughts!—the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!""

"A sacred spark created by his breath, The immortal mind of man his image bears; A spirit living 'midst the forms of death, Oppressed, but not subdued, by mortal cares."

"A small piece of pure ... was placed upon an insulated disk of platina, connected with the negative side of the battery... and a platina wire communicating with the positive side, was brought into contact with the... surface of the alkali. ...The potash began to fuse at both its points of electrization. There was a violent effervescence at the upper surface; at the lower, or negative, surface, there was no liberation of elastic fluid; but small globules, having a high metallic lustre, and being precisely similar in visible characters to quicksilver, appeared, some of which burnt with explosion and bright flame, as soon as they were formed, and others remained, and were merely tarnished, and finally covered with a white film which formed on their surfaces."

"You write with great eloquence and truth on the effects of mountain scenery on the mind. Whatever exalts the imagination purifies the affections; but even our noblest and best thoughts have their archetypes in sensation. The eye is the most perfect of all the senses, and the one that most feeds the intellect. When surrounded by the grand forms of nature, we give to earth something of the indefinite character of heaven. Great objects excite great thoughts; the standard of our being rises; all our low and grovelling associations disappear; and our sympathies are more strongly awakened with regard to the moral, sublime, the excellent, the decorous, and the great in philosophy. We are more fitted to enjoy the blaze of light of Milton, to pass into the -forms of humanity with Shakespeare, and to move through the heavens with Newton. ... I am leading a truly philosophical life of activity, and the constant pursuit of an object, the elements of such a life. Such moments as I am now passing in the crowded city, prove to me how fitted our being is for independent and solitary thoughts; how much its strength depends upon its own efforts, and how little it owes to general society. Pray do not forget me, and believe me to be, very truly and affectionately, yours..."

"That the forms of natural bodies may depend upon different arrangements of the same particles of matter has been a favourite hypothesis advanced in the earliest era of physical research, and often supported by the reasonings of the ablest philosophers. This sublime chemical speculation sanctioned by the authority of Hooke, Newton, and Boscovich, must not be confounded with the ideas advanced by the alchemists concerning the convertibility of the elements into each other. The possible transmutation of metals has generally been reasoned upon not as a philosophical research, but as an empirical process. Those who have asserted the actual production of the precious metals from other elements, or their decomposition, or who have defended the chimera of the philosopher's stone, have been either impostors, or men deluded by impostors. In this age of rational inquiry it will be useless to decry the practices of the adepts, or to caution the public against confounding the hypothetical views respecting the elements founded upon distinct analogies, with the dreams of alchemical visionaries, most of whom, as an author of the last century justly observed, professed an art without principles, the beginning of which was deceit, the progress delusion, and the end poverty."

"Every new discovery may be considered as a new species of manufacture, awakening moral industry and sagacity, and employing, as it were, new capital of mind."

"Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer."

"It is surely a pure delight to know, how and by what processes this earth is clothed with verdure and life, how the clouds, mists and rain are formed, what causes all the changes of this terrestrial system of things, and by what divine laws order is preserved amidst apparent confusion. It is a sublime occupation to investigate the cause of the tempest and the volcano, and to point out their use in the economy of things, — to bring the lightning from the clouds and make it subservient to our experiments, — to produce as it were a microcosm in the laboratory of art, and to measure and weigh those invisible atoms, which, by their motions and changes according to laws impressed upon them by the Divine Intelligence, constitute the universe of things. The true chemical philosopher sees good in all the diversified forms of the external world. Whilst he investigates the operations of infinite power guided by infinite wisdom, all low prejudices, all mean superstitions disappear from his mind. He sees man an atom amidst atoms fixed upon a point in space; and yet modifying the laws that are around him by understanding them; and gaining, as it were, a kind of dominion over time, and an empire in material space, and exerting on a scale infinitely small a power seeming a sort of shadow or reflection of a creative energy, and which entitles him to the distinction of being made in the image of God and animated by a spark of the divine mind. Whilst chemical pursuits exalt the understanding, they do not depress the imagination or weaken genuine feelings; whilst they give the mind habits of accuracy, by obliging it to attend to facts, they likewise extend its analogies; and, though conversant with the minute forms of things, they have for their ultimate end the great and magnificent objects of nature. They regard the formation of a crystal, the structure of a pebble, the nature of a clay or earth; and they apply to the causes of the diversity of our mountain chains, the appearances of the winds, thunder-storms, meteors, the earthquake, the volcano, and all those phenomena which offer the most striking images to the poet and the painter. They keep alive that inextinguishable thirst after knowledge, which is one of the greatest charactics of our nature; — for every discovery opens a new field for investigation of facts, shows us the imperfection of our theories. It has justly been said, that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded."

"I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing."

"Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer."

"Davy held that if the battery is strong enough any compound may be decomposed, and that chemical affinity is merely a form of electric attraction. He vigorously put his theory into practice..."

"Berthollet's conclusion that chlorine is oxymuriatic acid was universally accepted until Gay-Lussac and Thénard in 1809 endeavoured to decompose the gas and failed. They concluded that it contained water because it yielded water when passed over litharge. Their researches read to the Institute in 1809 led Davy to investigate muriatic acid (hydrochloric acid) gas, which in 1808 he had shown to be decomposed by potassium, with evolution of hydrogen. In 1810 he proved that chlorine is an element, and that muriatic acid gas is a compound of chlorine and hydrogen. He thus overturned the oxygen-acid theory, and demonstrated that muriates are compounds of metals with chlorine. He pointed to the fact that some acids, such as sulphuretted hydrogen, contain no oxygen, and argued that muriatic acid gas was one of these, chlorine in it taking the place of oxygen. ...The conclusions of Davy were at first doubted, but when iodine and bromine were also discovered, Gay-Lussac and his followers adopted Davy's views. The latter worked out fluorine, and proved that hydrofluoric acid (HF) contains no oxygen. Berzelius also opposed Davy until the discovery of iodine, but embraced the latter's opinion in 1820."

"Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered Sodium."

"I need only remind you of Davy's great researches: nitrous oxide; electric conduction and decomposition—resulting, on the one hand, in the separation of potassium and sodium, the decomposition of the earths following as a necessary consequence, and on the other in the electro-chemical theory; iodine and chlorine—resulting in the extension and confirmation of the word element, the discovery of the so-called hydrogen acids, and the important modification of the French theory of the constitution of acids; the investigation of gaseous explosion and of flame, and the invention of the safety lamp. These are the contributions to science which stand out more prominently in connection with Davy. But over and above all this is the peculiar manner of his discoveries. He was no patient plodder. He did not elaborate his work in minute detail. He dashed it off in broad masses; but just on that account there has never been anyone to follow up his investigations. Davy's mantle fell on no one, not even on Faraday."

"In September, 1807, our illustrious chemist applied his great principle to the analyses of potash, the vegetable alkali. Some had supposed it to consist of lime and hydrogen; others conjectured that it might contain nitrogen; and Mr Davy himself conceived that it might consist of phosphorus, or sulphur united to nitrogen. After failing with strong aqueous solutions, and also with dry potash, from its being a non-conductor, he employed fused potash, and in this case inflammable matter was separated by the voltaic influence. He then tried 'a piece of potash moistened, and in this instance inflammable matter was developed.' On the 6th of October he found that the matter instantly burned when it touched water, and swam on its surface, reproducing potash.' In dry oxygen gas likewise it burnt into 'perfectly dry potash.' In like manner, Mr Davy succeeded in decomposing soda; and when he had thus proved that the two fixed alkalis were metallic oxides, he immediately supposed that the earths, which were so much more like to metallic oxides than the fixed alkalis, would be easily decomposed."

"The delight which Mr Davy experienced when he first saw the minute globules of ' (the new metal) burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, was witnessed by his relative and assistant Mr . 'He could not contain his joy—he actually danced about the room in ecstatic delight, and some little time was required for him to compose himself sufficiently to continue the experiment.'"

"These grand discoveries, which some ascribed to the 'enormous batteries which were placed in his hands,' were the result of his intellectual powers, not of fortuitous circumstances. His voltaic battery was within the reach of many of the chemists of Europe; and consisted, in fact, of three different batteries united, one of 24 plates of copper and zinc, 12 inches square, another of 100 plates of 6 inches, and another of 150 plates of 4 inches."

"While he was recording these splendid discoveries in his second Bakerian lecture, Mr Davy was thrown into a state of fever, and laboured under the deepest apprehension that he would die before he had finished his paper. This state of his mind was the prelude to a severe and long-protracted disease, which his friend and physician Dr Babington considered as the result of over-fatigue and excitement from his experimental labours and discoveries. During five weeks 'he struggled between life and death,' and it was not till the end of nine weeks that his convalescence commenced. The anxious enquiries of all ranks exhibited the personal regard which he commanded, and the public importance which was attached to his recovery."

"It was fortunate for science that Mr Davy survived this severe malady without any injury to his constitution, or any diminution of his mental powers. He resumed his enquiries with his wonted ardour, and by the liberality of the managers and principal members of the Royal Institution, he was furnished with the means of pursuing them with success. During his convalescence, a voltaic battery of 600 double plates, each four inches square, was constructed and placed at his disposal; and not long afterwards, when a more powerful apparatus was thought desirable, the munificence of a few individuals supplied him with another battery of no less than 2000 plates. This powerful artillery was now directed against the earths; but the task of these analyses was more difficult than he expected."

"I breakfasted this morning with Sir Humphry Davy, of whom we have heard so much in America. He is now about thirty—three, but with all the freshness and bloom of five-and-twenty, and one of the handsomest men I have seen in England. He has a great deal of vivacity,—talks rapidly, though with great precision, and is so much interested in conversation, that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience, and keeps him in constant motion."

"He has just returned from Italy, and delights to talk of it,—thinks it, next to England, the finest country in the world, and the society of Rome surpassed only by that of London, and says he should not die contented without going there again."

"It seemed singular that his taste in this should be so acute, when his professional eminence is in a province so different and remote; but I was much more surprised when I found that the first chemist of his time was a professed angler; and that he thinks, if he were obliged to renounce fishing or philosophy, that he should find the struggle of his choice pretty severe."

"After breakfast Sir Humphry took me to the , where he used to lecture before he married a woman of fortune and fashion, and where he still goes every day to perform chemical experiments for purposes of research. He showed me the library and model-room, his own laboratory and famous galvanic troughs, and at two o'clock took me to a lecture there, by Sir James Smith, on botany,—very good and very dull."

"The publication of Davy's discovery created an extrordinary sensation throughout the civilised world, a sensation not less profound, and certainly more general from its very nature, than that which attended his lecture of the previous year. But at the very moment of his triumph, it seemed that the noise of the universal acclaim with which it was received was not to reach him."

"Almost immediately after the delivery of his lecture he collapsed, struck down by an illness which nearly proved fatal, and for weeks his life hung on a thread. He had been in a low feverish condition for some time previously, and a great dread had fallen upon him that he should die before he had completed his discoveries. It was in this condition of body and mind that he had applied himself to the task of putting together an account of his results."

"Four days after this was given to the world he took to his bed, and he remained there for nine weeks. Such a blow following hard on the heels of such a triumph aroused the liveliest sympathy. The doors of the Royal Institution were beset by anxious inquirers, and written reports of his condition at various periods of the day had to be posted in the hall."

"The strength of the feeling may be gleaned, too, from the sentences with which the Rev. Dr. Dibdin, who... began the lecture introductory to the Session of 1808."...If it had pleased Providence to deprive the world of all further benefit from his original talents and intense application, there has certainly been sufficient already effected by him to entitle him to be classed among the brightest scientific luminaries of his country. ...These may justly be placed among the most brilliant and valuable discoveries which have ever been made in chemistry, for a great chasm in the chemical system has been filled up; a blaze of light has been diffused over that part which before was utterly dark; and new views have been opened, so numerous and interesting, that the more any man who is versed in chemistry reflects on them, the more he finds to admire and heighten his expectation of future important results. Mr. Davy's name, in consequence of these discoveries, will be always recorded in the annals of science amongst those of the most illustrious philosophers of his time. His country... will be proud of him, and it is no small honour to the that these great discoveries have been made within its walls—in that laboratory, and by those instruments... placed at the disposal and for the use of its most excellent professor of chemistry.""

"Have and at all justified the hope that they would facilitate the means of procuring the comforts and conveniences of life? I have not the time... to attempt to follow the many changes in the metallurgy of the metals of the alkalis of the past century. Let me... show how the matter stands at the end of a hundred years."

"The general properties and chemical activities of potassium and sodium are so very similar that as a matter of commercial production that metal which can be most economically obtained is necessarily the one most largely manufactured, and of the two that metal is sodium. To-day, sodium is made by thousands of tons, and by a process which in principle is identical with that by which it was first made by Davy, i.e., by the of fused caustic soda."

"[A]fter a series of revolutions in its manufacture, sodium, having been produced from time to time on a manufacturing scale by a variety of metallurgical methods involving purely thermal processes of reduction and distillation, entirely dissociated from electricity, we should have now got back to the very principle of the process which first brought the metal to light. And that this has been industrially possible is entirely owing to another of Davy's discoveries - possibly indeed the greatest of them all—Michael Faraday."

"As we all gratefully acknowledge, it is to the genius and labours of Faraday—Davy's successor in this place—that the astonishing development of the application of electrical energy which characterises this age has taken rise."

"The modern method of production of sodium is based, therefore, as regards principles upon the conjoint labours of Davy and Faraday. ...These principles took their present form of application at the hands of... Hamilton Y. Castner... It is by Castner's process that all the sodium of to-day is manufactured."

"The greater quantity of the sodium made in England is... converted into ... for use in the extraction of gold. As gold is... generally considered the principal material factor in procuring the comforts and conveniences of life, Davy's great discovery may be thus said to have secured the primary object which the projectors of the Royal Institution had in view. Other important uses of sodium are in the manufacture of peroxide for bleaching purposes, of artificial , and of a number of other synthetic dye stuffs and of drugs like antipyrin."

"I am indebted to the directors of the Castner-Kellner Company... or affording me the opportunity, in connection with this lecture, of actually witnessing the modern process of manufacturing sodium as it is carried out at ... And in concluding may I be permitted to recall here the feelings to which that visit to Wallsend gave rise. ...Before me, stretching down to the river, was the factory where a score of workers, clad in helmets and gauntlets and swathed like so many Knights Templar, travel-stained and war-worn, their visages lit up by the yellow soda flames, and their ears half-deafened with the sound of exploding —a veritable inferno—were repeating on a Gargantuan scale the little experiment first made a century ago in the cellars of this building; turning out, day and night, hundredweights of the plastic metal in place of the little pin-heads which then burst upon the astonished and delighted gaze of Davy."

"Behind me was the magnificent power-house... furnishing not only the electrical energy which transformed the soda into sodium, but diffusing this energy for a multitude of other purposes over an entire district—a noble temple to the genius and prescience of Faraday. Surely one might here say, if you desire to see the monuments of these men, look around!"

"If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We've alienated them. We've sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we've done ourselves no long-term damage."

"ALL THIS IS A DREAM. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency."

"It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility."

"I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it — and I therefore hope and am fully persuaded that you are working. Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets an error right, gives us (as a reward for our humility in being reproved) an absolute advancement in knowledge."

"A man who makes assertions, or draws conclusions, regarding any given case, ought to be competent to investigate it. He has no right to throw the onus on others, declaring it their duly to prove him right or wrong. His duty is to demonstrate the truth of that which he asserts, or to cease from asserting. The men he calls upon to consider and judge have enough to do with themselves, in the examination, correction, or verification of their own views. The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and adverse examination; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized."

"I was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear upon the subject, and then wondered to see that the subject stood it so well."

"But still try, for who knows what is possible..."

"If you would cause your view … to be acknowledged by scientific men; you would do a great service to science. If you would even get them to say yes or no to your conclusions it would help to clear the future progress. I believe some hesitate because they do not like their thoughts disturbed."

"Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense."

"I have not been at work except in turning the tables upon table turners – nor should I have done that but that so many enquiries poured in upon me that I thought it better to stop the inpouring flood by letting all know at once what my views and thoughts were. What a weak credulous, incredulous, unbelieving superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is. I declare that taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me (and apart from that spirit which God has placed in each) and accepting for a moment that average as a standard, I should far prefer the obedience affections and instinct of a dog before it. Do not whisper this however to others. There is one above who worketh in all things and who governs even in the midst of that misrule to which the tendencies and powers of man are so easily perverted."

"I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds."

"We learn by such results as these, what is the kind of education that science offers to man. It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise the small beginnings — they precede of necessity all great things. Vesicles make clouds; they are trifles light as air, but then they make drops, and drops make showers, rain makes torrents and rivers, and these can alter the face of a country, and even keep the ocean to its proper fulness and use. It teaches a continual comparison of the small and great, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in principle, as the great does the small; and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment, to discover and obey law, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past."

"Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces. All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man."

"There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

"No wonder that my remembrance fails me, for I shall complete my 70 years next Sunday (the 22); — and during these 70 years I have had a happy life; which still remains happy because of hope and content."

"I am, I hope, very thankful that in the withdrawal of the powers and things of life, the good hope is left with me, which makes the contemplation of death a comfort — not a fear. Such peace is alone the gift of God, and as it is He who gives it, why should we be afraid? His unspeakable gift in His beloved Son is the ground of no doubtful hope, and there is the rest for those who (like you and me) are drawing near the latter end of our terms here below. I do not know, however why I should join you with me in years. I forget your age, but this I know (and feel as well) that next Sabbath day (the 22nd) I shall complete my 70th year. I can hardly think myself so old as I write to you — so much of cheerful spirit, ease and general health is left to me, and if my memory fails, why it causes that I forget troubles as well as pleasure and the end is, I am happy and content."

"The secret is comprised in three words — Work, Finish, Publish."

"Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties. I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day."

"The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly."

"The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction."

"As when on some secluded branch in forest far and wide sits perched an owl, who, full of self-conceit and self-created wisdom, explains, comments, condemns, ordains and order things not understood, yet full of importance still holds forth to stocks and stones around — so sits and scribbles Mike."

"Whereas, according to the declaration of that true man of the world Talleyrand, the use of language is to conceal the thoughts; this is to declare in the present instance, when I say I am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any mistake, or equivocation, or oblique meaning, or implication, or subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able; being at present rather weak in the head, and able to work no more."

"I shall be with Christ, and that is enough."

"An intimate friend of Faraday once described to me how, when Faraday was endeavouring to explain to Gladstone and several others an important new discovery in science Gladstone's only commentary was “but, after all, what use is it?” “Why, sir,” replied Faraday, “there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!”"

"Faraday found no conflict between his religious beliefs and his activities as a scientist and philosopher. He viewed his discoveries of nature's laws as part of the continual process of "reading the book of nature", no different in principle from the process of reading the Bible to discover God's laws. A strong sense of the unity of God and nature pervaded Faraday's life and work."

"Faraday was the first scientist to realise the enormous importance of the electromagnetic field. He saw in it a reality of a new category differing from matter. It was capable of transmitting effects from place to place, and was not to be likened to a mere mathematical fiction such as the gravitational field was then assumed to be. In his opinion, the phenomena of electricity and magnetism should be approached via the field rather than via the charged bodies and currents. In other words, according to Faraday, when a current was flowing along a wire, the most important aspect of the phenomenon lay not in the current itself but in the fields of electric and magnetic force distributed throughout space in the current's vicinity. It is this elevation of the field to a position of preeminence that is often called the pure physics of the field. Faraday was not a mathematician and was unable to co-ordinate the phenomena he foresaw in a mathematical way, and derive the full benefit from his ideas. Before dying, however, he entrusted this task to his colleague Maxwell; and one of the most astonishing theories of science, eclipsed only in recent years by Einstein's theory of relativity, was the outcome."

"If the idea of physical reality had ceased to be purely atomic, it still remained for the time being purely mechanistic; people still tried to explain all events as the motion of inert masses; indeed no other way of looking at things seemed conceivable. Then came the great change, which will be associated for all time with the names of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Hertz."

"Would Faraday have discovered the law of electromagnetic induction if he had received a regular college education?"

"With the realization that electric currents make magnetic fields, people immediately suggested that, somehow or other, magnets might also make electric fields. Various experiments were tried. For example, two wires were placed parallel to each other and a current was passed through one of them in the hope of finding a current in the other. The thought was that the magnetic field might in some way drag the electrons along in the second wire, giving some such law as "likes prefer to move alike." With the largest available current and the most sensitive galvanometer to detect any current, the result was negative. Large magnets next to wires also produced no observed effects. Finally, Faraday discovered in 1840 the essential feature that had been missed—that electric effects exist only when there is something changing. If one of a pair of wires has a changing current, a current is induced in the other, or if a magnet is moved near an electric circuit, there is a current. We say that currents are induced. This was the induction effect discovered by Faraday. It transformed the rather dull subject of static fields into a very exciting dynamic subject with an enormous range of wonderful phenomena."

"When his faculties were fading fast, he would sit long at the western window, watching the glories of the sunset; and one day, when his wife drew his attention to a beautiful rainbow that spanned the sky, he looked beyond the falling shower and the many-colored arch, and observed, "He hath set his testimony in the heavens." On August 25, 1867, quietly, almost imperceptively, came the release. There was a philosopher less on earth, and a saint more in heaven."

"Study of the conduction of electricity in liquids became possible at the beginning of the nineteenth century, following the discovery of the electrolytic cell by Volta in 1800, which provided the first continuous source of electric current. It was soon discovered that the conduction of electricity by solutions is accompanied by chemical reactions at the electrodes which serve to conduct the current into and out of the solution. Nicholson and Carlisle demonstrated the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen by a current in 1801. Davy's discovery of sodium and potassium metals by electrolysis of moist soda and [caustic] potash was a striking example of the novelty of electrochemical decomposition. Many of the phenomena of electrolysis were already known when Michael Faraday began his researches. It was the quantitative relationship between electrochemical change and current which interested Faraday and enabled him to correlate the mass of experimental data that had accumulated since 1800. Faraday's laws of electrolysis, which were published in 1833, state: (1) that the amount of chemical decomposition produced by an electric current (that is, the mass of substance deposited or dissolved at an electrode) is proportional to the quantity of electricity passed. (2) that the amounts of different substances released or dissolved at electrodes by the same quantity of electricity are proportional to their chemical equivalents. From the second law, it follows that the amount of electricity required to liberate or dissolve one equivalent weight of any substance by electrolysis is constant. It was not until after Faraday's death that the significance of his laws of electrolysis for atomic theory was realized. In 1881 von Helmholtz pointed out that if elementary substances are composed of atoms, it follows from Faraday's laws of electrolysis that electricity also is composed of elementary portions which behave like atoms of electricity. Investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases led to the identification of the electron as the fundamental unit of electricity at the end of the century. Faraday's positive and negative ions are therefore atoms (or groups of atoms or radicals)) with a deficiency or an excess of an integral number of electrons, where the integral number is the valency of the atom. The ions move in opposite directions through the solution to the electrodes where their charges are neutralised, causing them to be discharged to neutral atoms or radicals. These are the primary electrode reactions, of which the deposition of silver on a platinum cathode in the silver coulometer is a typical example."

"He was little interested mathematics or theory; for example, when his ideas on magnetic fields were extensively developed later by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), Faraday was little concerned with the results. His own scientific career was characterized by simple ideas and simple experiments."

"In 1831 his original researches began to center about the relation of electricity and magnetism. ...Even as early as 1824 he had noticed the effects of a current of electricity upon a magnet. Now he found that this electrical action could be increased if the wire carrying the current was made into a coil. From that point he went on to study the push or pulling action of the coil upon the magnet, the effect of having a coil of more turns, and a way by which the coil and magnet, if free to move, could be made to move around each other. He was working out the principles that operate in today's electric motors. By 1831 he had reversed the problem... He had shown that the mere motion of the magnet within a closed-end coil was enough to set moving through the coil a small current that had not been there before. He called this new current an "induced" one and proceeded to study how the current could be increased in its quantity and intensity. The experimental results were revolutionary. The principles of induction discovered by Faraday are used today in telephones, induction coils, electric generators, transformers, the motors of electric clocks, and dozens of other pieces of electrical equipment."

"As a philosopher, his first great characteristic was the trust which he put in facts. He said of himself, "In early life I was a very lively imaginative person, who could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia, but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact." Over and over again he showed his love of experiments in his writings and lectures: "Without experiment I am nothing." "But still try, for who knows what is possible?" "All our theories are fixed upon uncertain data, and all of them want alteration and support from facts." "One thing, however, is fortunate, which is, that whatever our opinions, they do not alter nor derange the laws of nature." His second great characteristic was his imagination. It rose sometimes to divination, or scientific second sight, and led him to anticipate results that he or others afterwards proved to be true."

"I have been favoured by a sight of the forthcoming series of Dr. Faraday's admirable "Researches;" in which that assiduous and successful philosopher labours to prove by experiment that electrical induction is transmitted to distant bodies by intervening matter."

"Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electro-magnetism."

"To estimate the intensity of Faraday's scientific power, we cannot do better than read the first and second series of his Researches and compare them...with the whole course of electro-magnetic science since, which has added no new idea to those set forth, but has only verified the truth and scientific value of every one of them."

"It is not till we attempt to bring the theoretical part of our training into contact with the practical that we begin to experience the full effect of what Faraday has called "mental inertia"—not only the difficulty of recognising, among the concrete objects before us, the abstract relation which we have learned from books, but the distracting pain of wrenching the mind away from the symbols to the objects, and from the objects back to the symbols. This however is the price we have to pay for new ideas."

"His health [was] probably affected by mercury poisoning. This was a then unrealized health hazard that undoubtedly affected many nineteenth-century scientists who worked in the laboratory, where spilled mercury often accumulated between and beneath floorboards and generated a permanent atmosphere of mercury vapor."

"Faraday carried on experimenting until he was over 70. He died in 1867, the year that Das Kapital was published, and he was buried in Highgate cemetery... where Marx was to join him later."

"Gradually... during the second half of the nineteenth century, the uncomfortable feeling of dislike of the action at a distance, which had been so strong in Huygens and other contemporaries of Newton, but had subsided during the eighteenth century, began to emerge again, and gained strength rapidly. This was favoured by the purely mathematical transformation (which can be compared in a sense with that from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system), replacing Newton's finite equations by the differential equations, the potential becoming the primary concept, instead of the force, which is only the gradient of the potential. These ideas, of course, arose first in the theory of electricity and magnetism or perhaps one should say in the brain of Faraday."

"A point highly illustrative of the character of Faraday now comes into view. He gave an account of his discovery of Magneto-electricity in a letter to his friend M. Hachette, of Paris, who communicated the letter to the Academy of Sciences. The letter was translated and published ; and immediately afterwards two distinguished Italian philosophers took up the subject, made numerous experiments, and published their results before the complete memoirs of Faraday had met the public eye. This evidently irritated him. He reprinted the paper of the learned Italians in the Philosophical Magazine accompanied by sharp critical notes from himself. He also wrote a letter dated Dec. 1,1832, to Gay Lussac, who was then one of the editors of the Annales de Chimie in which he analysed the results of the Italian philosophers, pointing out their errors, and' defending himself from what he regarded as imputations on his character. The style of this letter is unexceptionable, for Faraday could not write otherwise than as a gentleman; but the letter shows that had he willed it he could have hit hard. We have heard much of Faraday's gentleness and sweetness and tenderness. It is all true, but it is very incomplete. You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives "gentle" and "tender" would by no means apply. Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion. "He that is slow to anger" saith the sage, "is greater than the mighty, and he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city." Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts."

"The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them. The multiplication of proofs, necessary and interesting when the new truths had to be established, are however less needful now when these truths have become household words in science."

"The conception of lines of force was introduced by Faraday to form a mental picture of the processes going on in the electric field. To him these lines were not mere mathematical abstractions. He ascribed to them properties that gave them a real physical significance. They terminate on opposite charges, are always in a state of tension, tending to shorten themselves, and are mutually repellent. The direction of a line of force at any point gives the direction of the field at that point. With the help of these properties of lines of force it is possible to obtain an idea of the distribution of the intensity of the field surrounding electrically charged bodies. The idea of tubes of force has been introduced to make the method of Faraday metrical rather than merely descriptive. A tube of force is obtained by drawing a number of lines of force through the boundary of any small closed curve. The lines then form a tubular surface, which, it can be proved, will never be cut by any lines of force, and the extremities of which enclose equal and opposite charges. By properly choosing the area of the surface enclosed by the curve through which the lines are drawn the extremities of the tube can be made to enclose unit charge. Such a unit tube is called a Faraday tube. Maxwell and J. J. Thomson have made an exhaustive study of these tubes of force and expressed their properties in mathematical terms. The result that interests us here is that a tube of force behaves as though it had inertia, so that in order to move a tube work must be done. This explains why a charge behaves as if it had mass. It must be remarked that the conception of tubes of forces is used here merely to aid in understanding the phenomena. Whether or not tubes of force, or even the ether, possess any physical significance is a question. Modern developments seem to indicate that this question must be answered in the negative."

"When I first came abroad, every thing struck me, and I wrote its history; but now I am grown so used to be surprised, that I don't perceive any flutter in myself when I meet with any novelties; curiosity and astonishment wear off, and the next thing is, to fancy that other people know as much of places as one's self; or, at least, one does not remember that they do not. It appears to me as odd to write to you of St. Peter's, as it would do to you to write of Westminster-abbey. Besides, as one looks at churches, &c. with a book of travels in one's hand, and sees every thing particularised there, it would appear transcribing, to write upon the same subjects."

"Harry Vane, Pulteney's toad-eater."

"It always amazes me, when I reflect on the women, who are the first to propagate scandal of one another. If they would but agree not to censure what they all agree to do, there would be no more loss of characters among them than amongst men. A woman cannot have an affair, but instantly all her sex travel about to publish it and leave her off: now, if a man cheats another of his estate at play, forges a will, or marries his ward to his own son, nobody thinks of leaving him off for such trifles!"

"Why, I'll swear I see no difference between a country gentleman and a sirloin; whenever the first laughs, or the latter is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy! ... Oh! my dear Sir, don't you find that nine parts in ten of the world are of no use but to make you wish yourself with that tenth part? ..."

"Our supreme governors, the mob."

"My aversion to them...springs from the perniciousness of that sect to society—I hate Papists, as a man, not as a Protestant. If Papists were only enemies to the religion of other men, I should overlook their errors. As they are foes to liberty, I cannot forgive them."

"If a passion for freedom is not in vogue, patriots may sound the alarm till they are weary. The Act of Habeas Corpus, by which prisoners may insist on being brought to trial within a limited time, is the corner-stone of our liberty."

"A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary."

"Instead of the glorious and ever-memorable year 1759, as the newspapers call it, I call it this ever-warm and victorious year. We have not had more conquest than fine weather: one would think we had plundered East and West Indies of sunshine. Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories. I believe it will require ten votes of the House of Commons before people believe it is the Duke of Devonshire that has done this, and not Mr. Pitt."

"The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel– a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept."

"It was easier to conquer it [the East] than to know what to do with it."

"A careless song, with a little nonsense in it now and then, does not misbecome a monarch."

"The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room."

"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra."

"To act with common sense, according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know; and the best philosophy, to do one's duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one's lot, bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it, whatever it is, and despise affectation."

"The whole nation hitherto has been void of wit and humour, and even incapable of relishing it."

"Prognostics do not always prove prophecies, — at least the wisest prophets make sure of the event first."

"It is the story of a mountebank and his zany."

"Allen of Bath procured them the same honours from thence; and for some weeks it rained gold boxes: Chester, Worcester, Norwich, Bedford, Salisbury, Yarmouth, Tewkesbury, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Stirling, and other populous and chief towns following the example. Exeter, with singular affection, sent boxes of heart of oak."

"Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors."

"Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent."

"He was my counsel in affairs, was my oracle in taste, the standard to whom I submitted my trifles, and the genius that presided over poor Strawberry."

"Manfred was not one of those savage tyrants who wanton in cruelty unprovoked. The circumstances of his fortune had given an asperity to his temper, which was naturally humane; and his virtues were always ready to operate, when his passions did not obscure his reason."

"“Peace, simpleton!” said the Princess. “Though he said he was unhappy, it does not follow that he must be in love.”"

"Have done with this rhapsody of impertinence."

"And is anybody unhappy about another, unless they are in love with them?"

"“Heaven,” replied Manfred, “does not send Heralds to question the title of a lawful Prince. I doubt whether it even notifies its will through Friars—but that is your affair, not mine."

"You think me ambitious: ambition, alas! is composed of more rugged materials. If I were ambitious, I should not for so many years have been a prey to all the hell of conscientious scruples."

"Thy purpose is as odious as thy resentment is contemptible."

"“My councils do not need a Friar’s intervention,” said Manfred; “and of all men living is that hoary traitor the only one whom you delight to confer with?”"

"The Americans are mostly engaged in trade and plantations. Their chief object is to make money. And, in truth, money is freedom."

"These horrible affairs in France are the offspring of fanaticism. Yes, sir; if the reformation had taken place there, as well as here, religion and the clergy would have been respected, as they are here. Fanatics make atheists. If I cannot believe in God without believing that a wafer is God, my reason abjures the deity. I wish religion to exist: it is of infinite use to society, and I therefore wish it to be as rational as possible. A synod of the English church might order several objectionable tenets and expressions of our worship to be altered. I love those reformations that prevent revolutions, by keeping pace with the gradual progress of reason and knowledge."

"Lord Bolingbroke discovered a foible of the great duke of Marlborough, that he delighted in tying Miss Jenning's garters. When he repeated the story, he used to add, "What is known to women is known to the world.""

"Lord Bute was my schoolfellow. He was a man of taste and science, and I do believe his intentions were good. He wished to blend and unite all parties. The Tories were willing to come in for a share of power, after having been so long excluded—but the Whigs were not willing to grant that share. Power is an intoxicating draught; the more a man has, the more he desires."

"Sir Robert Walpole used to say, that it was fortunate so few men could be prime ministers, as it was best that few should thoroughly know the shocking wickedness of mankind. I never heard him say, that all men have their prices; and I believe no such expression ever came from his mouth."

"William, Duke of Cumberland, gave promises of talents that were never accomplished. One day he had given some offence to his royal mother, and was remanded to the confinement of his chamber. After what the queen thought a sufficient duration of his punishment, she sent for him. He returned in a very sullen humour. "What have you been doing?" said the queen.—"Reading."—"What book?"—"The New Testament."—"Very well. What part?"—"Where it is said, Woman, why troublest thou me?""

"A fig for our democrats! [1792]. Barking dogs never bite. The danger in France arose from silent and instantaneous action. They said nothing, and did every thing—ours say every thing, and will do nothing."

"I visit Paris often, and have considerably studied the French character. In individuals it is often excellent; but taken in general it disgusts by its petulance and vanity. The French have always been dissolute in their amours; and are thus led to assail the chastity of foreign women, the most unpardonable of all affronts to fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers. This, and their petulant overbearing conduct, prevent their conquests from being lasting. Yes, I swear to you by the Sicilian vespers, they can never be of much duration."

"Mr. Hollis is always publishing republican books, and yet professes great veneration for our constitution. I cannot reconcile this; our constitution being, in its leading part, an oligarchy, the form, perhaps, of all others, the most opposite to a republic."

"I have sometimes thought that a squire and a vestry were a king and republic in miniature. The vestry is as tyrannic, in its way, as the squire in his. Any power necessarily leads to abuses of that power. It is difficult to stop any impetus of nature."

"We must speak to the eyes, if we wish to affect the mind."

"If Milton had written in Italian, he would have been, in my opinion, the most perfect poet in modern languages; for his own strength of thought would have condensed and hardened that speech to a proper degree."

"Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments."

"Good men are never concerned in revolutions, because they will not go the lengths. Sunderland caused the revolution of 1688, while Devonshire stood aloof—the latter was the angel, the former the storm. Bad men and poisonous plants are sometimes of superlative use in skilful hands."

"Rousseau's ideas of savage life are puerile. He is equally absurd in supposing that no people can be free, if they entrust their freedom to representatives. What is every body's business is nobody's business. The people would soon be sick of such freedom; they must attend to their own private business, else they could not live. The people of France are easily electrified. We are too solid for such dreams. Amber may draw straws: we do not gravitate so easily."

"The critics generally consider a tragedy as the next effort of the mind to an epic poem. For my part, I estimate the difficulty of writing a good comedy to be greater than that of composing a good tragedy. Not only equal genius is required, but a comedy demands a more uncommon assemblage of qualities—knowledge of the world, wit, good sense, &c; and these qualities superadded to those requisite for tragical composition."

"King William asked Mr. Locke how long he thought the revolution principles might last in England. The philosopher answered, "Till this generation shall have passed away, and our universities shall have had time to breed a new one." Many things I disapprove in our universities, where the country gentlemen are educated in Toryism by Tory clergy."

"To talk of the weather was once a matter of ridicule. But that soon went out; for the weather is, in fact, so important in this changeable climate, that our health and bread depend on it. There are also numerous classes in this island, farmers, seamen, &c. &c. whose very existence depends on the weather. It is idle to deny that the state of our spirits depends on the weather: the stoutest man cannot take exercise on a rainy day, and must feel ennui, because he cannot divide his time as usual. For my part, I care as little for the weather as any; and I sometimes say, that all I want is cold winters, and hot summers."

"We must thank the Whigs for all the prosperity of our country. The Tories have only thrown us into disagreeable crises. It is risible to hear the latter boast of the public happiness, which is wholly the work of their antagonists. They are so absurd as to regret the national freedom, the sole source of the wealth on which they fatten. Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes! Had the Tories succeeded at the revolution, or accession, this fair country would have been another Spain; the desolate abode of nobles and priests. What has rendered it the wonder and envy of Europe? Freedom. One would wonder that any man would conspire against the general felicity—but this infatuation arises from the esprit du corps, which can even produce mental blindness—can instigate its unhappy devotee to destroy the hen that lays the golden eggs."

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well."

"He was born a writer of letters, and if he had been shut up in a desert island like Robinson Crusoe he would have written letters all the same, and kept them till some ship arrived which should carry them to their destination."

"His politics are always under the strong influence of party and often of faction, and his details of social life and personal character are rendered more amusing indeed, but less trustworthy, by a strong seasoning of scandal, and occasionally of malice. It is not given to man to be at once of a party, and impartial — to be a gossip, and not censorious. We do not take the characters of Lord Wharton or Sir Robert Walpole from Swift, nor should we from Horace Walpole those of Bute or North."

"One thing that happens with gothic novels is the idea of the evil Other. That’s quite clear if you read Walpole or Radcliffe. It’s often an evil Italian or an evil Spaniard. Catholicism is mixed with that. It’s like these exotic evil Catholic people that are coming to pervert us."

"The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose, And the Rose loved one: For who recks the Wind where it blows? Or loves not the Sun?None knew whence the humble Wind stole, Poor sport of the skies: None dreamt that the Wind had a soul In its mournful sighs.O happy Beam, how canst thou prove That bright love of thine? In thy light is the proof of thy love, Thou hast but to shine.How its love can the Wind reveal? Unwelcome its sigh: Mute, mute to the Rose let it steal— Its proof is—to die!"

"Two lives that once part, are as ships that divide When, moment on moment there rushes between    The one and the other, a sea,— Ah, never can fall from the days that have been    A gleam on the years that shall be."

"There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy."

"A good heart is better than all the heads in the world."

"The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self."

"It is not Wisdom, but Ignorance, which teaches men presumption; Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as Knowledge."

"He is certainly a man who bathes and "lives cleanly," (two especial charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed)."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"Repent!—that is the idlest word in our language."

"Poverty makes some humble, but more malignant."

"The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells."

"Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature: it makes the proud man meek,—the cheerful, sad,—the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy, fall before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character."

"Fate laughs at probabilities."

"Buy my flowers—O buy—I pray! The blind girl comes from afar; If the earth be as fair as her children say, These flowers her children are!"

"He who has loved often has loved never."

"Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus—it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it."

"There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace."

"The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone."

"Books are waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought."

"There is no anguish like an error of which we feel ashamed."

"When stars are in the quiet skies,  Then most I pine for thee; Bend on me, then, thy tender eyes,  As stars look on the sea!"

"Beauty, thou art twice blessed; thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face."

"There is an old age which has more youth of heart than youth itself!"

"When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one."

"Castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up."

"Rank is a great beautifier."

"Curse away! And let me tell thee, Beauseant, a wise proverb The Arabs have,—"Curses are like young chickens, And still come home to roost!""

"You speak As one who fed on poetry."

"Love hath no need of words."

"Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword."

"Take away the sword— States can be saved without it!"

"Ambition has no risk."

"In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves For a bright manhood, there is no such word As "fail"."

"Our glories float between the earth and heaven Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun, And are the playthings of the casual wind."

"When a person's down in the world, I think an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching."

"The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan."

"Little minds give importance to the man who gives importance to nothing."

"Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny."

"To the man who aspires to know, no man who has been the meanest student of knowledge should be unknown."

"Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance."

"We commenced research where modern conjecture closes its faithless wings. And with us, those were the common elements of science which the sages of to-day disdain as wild chimeras, or despair of as unfathomable mysteries."

"Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue."

"Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!"

"Though Hope be a small child, she can carry a great anchor!"

"Night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the Universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is written,—"God is everywhere!""

""It is destiny!"—phrase of the weak human heart! "It is destiny!"—dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny! On earth, guides Conscience—in heaven, watches God. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one—to dethrone the other!"

"Light literature,—that grace and flower of human culture, that best philosophy of all, humanizing us with gentle art, making us wise through the humours, elevated through the passions, tender in the affections of our kind."

"The most useless creature that ever yawned at a club, or counted the vermin on his rags under the suns of Calabria, has no excuse for want of intellect. What men want is not talent, it is purpose,—in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labour."

"Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never. While we speak, new worlds are sparkling forth—suns are throwing off their nebulae—nebulae are hardening into worlds. The Almighty proves His existence by creating."

"The brilliant chief, irregularly great, Frank, haughty, rash,— the Rupert of debate!"

"Alone!—that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing, and grief hath known, Of hope laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!"

"Love gains the shrine when Pity opes the door."

"He never errs who sacrifices self."

"Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common—inquisitiveness. Let childhood have its way, and as it began where genius begins, it may find what genius finds."

"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read."

"It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is Intensity."

"We cannot think or act, but the soul of some man, who has lived before, points the way. The dead never die."

"Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors."

"It is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself, should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every desire he has links him with others."

"The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs action."

"Believe me that the happiest act of intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!"

"Be prepared for either wisdom through joy, or wisdom through grief. Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by which this mortal world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is impossible to wisdom."

"The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who, early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius."

"In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern."

"Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light—every eye looking on finds its own."

"Strike from mankind the principle of Faith, and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep."

"My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth."

"A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes to-day."

"Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn."

"There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood."

"Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to "the far-away.""

"The good man does good merely by living."

"This demonstrates an energy of exertion, a fecundity of invention, and a readiness of composition rarely to be met with; and when taken in connexion with the unquestionable excellence of several of his works, fairly entitles him to rank as one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the age. He is, undoubtedly, in prose, whether we regard his matter or his style, one of the best of our living writers. His poetry, however, is beneath mediocrity, and cannot but produce in the minds of the thousands who have read his novels with delight, a regret that he should waste his time in putting together such an heterogeneous and unmeaning mass of metre and rhyme as is contained in the "Siamese Twins," and some other of his poems. As a novelist, he is, without doubt, the most popular writer now living."

"You could not have the Victorian Age without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real touchstone of the time."

"Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming comedies about The Caxtons and Kenelm Chillingley; none of his other works have a high literary importance now; with the possible exception of A Strange Story; but his Coming Race is historically interesting as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a weapon of the Socialists."

"Men crowded to the House of Commons to hear the latest performance of "the orator of the century." Epigrams, antithesis, alliteration—all the conscious tricks of the trade—were packed into his ornate harangues, which no one now remembers."

"He Charles Greville] was the vainest being—I don't limit myself to man—that ever existed; and I don't forget Cicero and Lytton Bulwer."

"To complete the tale of my writings at this period, I may add that in 1833, at the request of Bulwer, who was just then completing his England and the English (a work, at that time, greatly in advance of the public mind), I wrote for him a critical account of Bentham's philosophy, a small part of which he incorporated in his text, and printed the rest (with an honourable acknowledgment), as an appendix In this, along with the favourable, a part also of the unfavourable side of my estimation of Bentham's doctrines, considered as a complete philosophy, was for the first time put into print."

"The sensation that is excited in the literary world by the simple announcement of a new work emanating from the pen of the talented E. L. Bulwer, is the precursor of the delight to be experienced by the perusal. Bulwer is the Napoleon of English literature—the great mover of that sphere in which he shines so resplendently—the individual whose magic quill, with one single drop of ink, can make thousands reflect. He is the metaphysician-novelist of England, as de Balzac is the pride of France. His works are not merely everyday books which we throw aside never to resume, after a hasty perusal: they are standard volumes in every library—they may occasionally serve as books of reference—their philosophy raises them to an eminence far above the common tale of interest purposely written to afford a momentary amusement."

"[William Henry] Harrison was speaking to Beckford about Bulwer. "A coxcomb", says Harrison. "Ay," said Beckford, "a cultivated one, and blows double!" Everybody has a spite at Bulwer because the public think him clever, and they don't."

"Lytton is one of the authors upon whose merits the critics have never agreed with the public. He won immense popularity in the face of generally hostile criticism, and even his success failed to obtain a reversal of the judgment. Some of his qualities, however, are incontestable. No English author has displayed more industry, energy, versatility, or less disposition to lapse into slovenliness. His last works are among his best; and though he often tried the experiment of publishing anonymously (as in The Caxtons and The Coming Race), his success showed that his popularity did not depend upon his previous fame."

"Lytton showed courage but hardly discretion in attempting to be more of a poet or philosopher than nature had made him. He had enough talent to convince himself that he had the genius which is above talent. He wrote some excellent verses in the style of Pope, but fancied that he could also be a Spenser. His characters show more shrewdness of observation than imaginative insight, and the stories, while most carefully designed and constructed, show, not creative impulse, but dexterous management and a quick eye for dramatic effect. His curious attempts at the mysterious too often remind us of spirit-rapping rather than excite the thrill of supernatural awe. He scarcely fails, however, unequivocally, unless in his attempts at the humorous or the descriptions of the lower orders. He shows so much ability and such sustained activity of thought that the critic feels some hesitation in disputing too strongly the claims of his admirers, and only regrets that he had not written at least one novel expressing his views of life frankly and vigorously, without aiming at the ideal or at the propitiation of the respectable. It might have been less edifying, but would certainly have been more interesting than his actual achievements."

"There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly."

"Of course, we must avoid postulating a new element for each new phenomenon. But an equally serious mistake is to admit into the theory only those elements which can now be observed. For the purpose of a theory is not only to correlate the results of observations that we already know how to make, but also to suggest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results. In fact, the better a theory is able to suggest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results correctly, the more confidence we have that this theory is likely to be good representation of the actual properties of matter and not simply an empirical system especially chosen in such a way as to correlate a group of already known facts."

"We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole."

"The weekend began with the expectation that there would be a series of lectures and informative discussions with emphasis on content. It gradually emerged that something more important was actually involved — the awakening of the process of dialogue itself as a free flow of meaning among all the participants. In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise."

"The point about dialectic is the ultimate identity of the universal and the individual. The individual is universal and the universal is the individual. The word "individual" means undivided, so we could say that very few individuals have ever existed. We could call them dividuals. Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness. ... Ego-centeredness is not individuality at all."

"Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it."

"Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter . . . Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven , just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation."

"The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained."

"During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale..."

"Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven't really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Every thinking requires attention, really. If we ran machines withinout paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong."

"We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then, we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti's major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or to put it differently it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening, when we are engaged in the activity of thinking."

"The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is "wind, or breath." This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies."

"I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment..."

"Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to 'know' another, and to what extent would this be possible?"

"Man's general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole."

"My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc. (Perhaps we could say that this is what is involved in harmony between the 'left brain' and the 'right brain'). This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society."

"The quantum theory, as it is now constituted, presents us with a very great challenge, if we are at all interested in such a venture, for in quantum physics there is no consistent notion at all of what the reality may be that underlies the universal constitution and structure of matter. Thus, if we try to use the prevailing world view based on the notions of particles, we discover that the 'particles' (such as electrons) can also manifest as waves, that they move discontinuously, that there are no laws at all that apply in detail to the actual movements of individual particles and that only statistical predictions can be made about large aggregates of such particles. If on the other hand we apply the world view in which the world is regarded as a continuous field, we find that this field must also be discontinuous, as well as particle-like, and that it is as undermined in its actual behaviour as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole."

"In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events, connectable by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness."

"The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it."

"In society, the basic carrier of meaning is culture, which is indeed just shared meaning."

"...if somebody sees a different meaning to society or to life, that will change society. Every revolution has come from somebody seeing a different meaning in human society."

"The power of meaning is that it completely organizes being."

"We have various ways of dealing with biological misinformation. The best way is by the immune system which recognizes it and gets rid of it, but we have no such system in society. Misinformation accumulates and society gradually decays. You see, the older the society gets, the more chance it has to accumulate all sorts of misinformation and the more it starts to fall a part. The society is blocked because misinformation is held rigidly."

"The fear of uncertainty is our basic trouble. Uncertainty is the very nature of meaning and the very nature of being, for meaning is always context-dependent. We do not know the context that might come, and this is why we can never be certain that our meanings will be correct and give us security. So if you cannot live with this fact of uncertainty, some distortion is taking place already."

"For both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. It is the main point of this book that the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is "hidden" because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society."

"Suppose you have two religions. Thought defines religion — the thought about the nature of God and various questions like that. Such thought is very important because it is about God, who is supposed to be supreme. The thought about what is of supreme value must have the highest force. So if you disagree about that, the emotional impact can be very great, and you will then have no way to settle it. Two different beliefs about God will thus produce intense fragmentation — similarly with thoughts about the nature of society, which is also very important, or with ideologies such as communism and capitalism, or with different beliefs about your family or about your money. Whatever it is that is very important to you, fragmentation in your thought about it is going to be very powerful in its effects."

"Difference exist because thought develops like a stream that happens to go one way here and another way there. Once it develops it produces real physical results that people are looking at, but they don't see where these results are coming from — that's one of the basic features of fragmentation. When they have produced these divisions they see that real things have happened, so they'll start with these real things as if they just suddenly got there by themselves, or evolved in nature by themselves."

"We often find that we cannot easily give up the tendency to hold rigidly to patterns of thought built up over a long time. We are then caught up in what may be called absolute necessity. This kind of thought leaves no room at all intellectually for any other possibility, while emotionally and physically, it means we take a stance in our feelings, in our bodies, and indeed, in our whole culture, of holding back or resisting. This stance implies that under no circumstances whatsoever can we allow ourselves to give up certain things or change them."

"If I am right in saying that thought is the ultimate origin or source, it follows that if we don't do anything about thought, we won't get anywhere. We may momentarily relieve the population problem, the ecological problem, and so on, but they will come back in another way."

"Of course, one of the main legitimate functions of thought has always been to help provide security, guaranteeing shelter and food for instance. However, this function went wrong when the principal source of insecurity came to be the operation of thought itself."

"Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture."

"What I mean by 'thought' is the whole thing — thought, 'felt', the body, the whole society sharing thoughts — it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thought becomes my thought, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thought, your thought, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings. I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent — not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system — it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on. Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society — as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that system began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. Now, I say that this system has a fault in it — a 'systematic fault'. It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But "my" thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I'm trying to look at, or a similar fault. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates."

"We started out saying the trouble is that the world is in chaos, but I think we end up by saying that thought is in chaos. That's each one of us. And that is the cause of the world's being in chaos. Then the chaos of the world comes back and adds to the chaos of thought."

"...thought is a very subtle set of reflexes which is potentially unlimited; you can add more and more and you can modify your reflexes. Suppose like a logician you say: 'All swans are white. This bird is a wan therefore this bird is white.' But then you modify this by saying, 'I've seen that some swans may not be white.' And so on. Even the whole logical process, once it's committed to memory, becomes a set of reflexes. There may be a perception of reason beyond the reflexes, but anything perceived becomes sooner or later a set of reflexes. And what's what I want to call 'thought' – which includes the emotion, the bodily state, the physical reaction and everything else."

"One of the most powerful thoughts people have is the thought of necessity. It is much more than a thought. The word 'necessary' means 'it cannot be otherwise', and the Latin root means 'don't yield'. It suggests the emotional-physical stance of resisting, holding. That's the other side of the reflex system: when you say 'it cannot be otherwise', in effect your'e saying: 'It has got to be this way. I have to keep it this way'. You have a hold. Something that is necessary is a very powerful force which you can't turn aside. You may say 'I have to turn it aside.' Thus we establish an order of necessity, saying 'this turns aside for that, and this for that.'"

"…when an insight is put into words, what is it that puts it into words? Is it thought or is it the insight? I want to suggest that the insight itself will be an insight into the words which express it properly."

"...the attempt to deal with social problems by force is incoherent, because the problems all arise in thought. And violence will never solve the problem in thought."

"...if you have found the words which express the way you are actually thinking, the body will be affected."

"There's nothing more ephemeral than thoughts; and yet thoughts can hold themselves by saying 'I must remain this way forever, with absolute necessity.' The point is to have the notion of a creative being, rather than of an identified being."

"The perception of truth is an actual act which changes things; it’s not merely that it is the truth about something which is different."

"...we see a rainbow, but what we have is drops of rain and light – a process. Similarly, what we 'see' is a self; but what we actually have is a whole lot of thoughts going on in consciousness. Against the backdrop of consciousness, we are projecting a self, rather than a rainbow."

"We don't need the notion of an identity, of an all-important identity on to which we are going to hold, because that gets in the way of the need to change our reflexes. Once we identify with something, our reflexes are that way – it's very important, 'necessary'. And we will want to preserve that identity even thought it may involve ideas that are false."

"Communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able to freely listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other. Each has to be interested primarily in truth and coherence, so that he is ready to drop his old ideas and intentions, and be ready to go on to something different, when this is called for."

"Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations, and even different parts of the same organization. In our modern culture men and women are able to interact with one another in many ways: they can sing, dance, or play together with little difficulty, but their ability to talk together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems invariably to lead to dispute, division, and often to violence. In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought."

"It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated."

"A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary discussion is that, within the latter people usually hold relatively fixed positions and argue in favor of their views as they try to convince others to change. At best this may produce agreement or compromise, but it does not give rise to anything creative."

"What is essential here is the presence of the spirit of dialogue, which is in short, the ability to hold many points of view in suspension, along with a primary interest in the creation of common meaning."

"In the early 1950s, [...] there were two important advances in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, both made by the American physicist David Bohm. Just as there were, it seems, two Bohrs, there were apparently two Bohms: a 1951 Bohm and a 1952 Bohm."

"I can tell you one thing. David Bohm knows a lot more than just a little about physics."

"Dave always arrives at the right conclusions, but his mathematics is terrible. I take it home and find all sorts of errors and then have to spend the night trying to develop the correct proof. But in the end, the result is always exactly the same as the one Dave saw directly."

"According to Bohm, the ground of the cosmos is not elementary particles but pure process, a flowing movement of the whole. Within this implicate order, Bohm believed, one could resolve the Cartesian split between mind and matter, or between brain and consciousness."

"The universe according to Bohm actually has two faces, or more precisely, two orders. One is the explicate order, corresponding to the physical world as we know it in day-to-day reality, the other a deeper, more fundamental order which Bohm calls the implicate order. The implicate order is the vast holomovement. We see only the surface of this movement as it presents or "explicates" itself from moment to moment in time and space. What we see in the world — the explicate order — is no more than the surface of the implicate order as it unfolds. Time and space are themselves the modes or forms of the unfolding process. They are like the screen on the video game. The displays on the screen may seem to interact directly with each other but, in fact, their interaction merely reflects what the game computer is doing. The rules which govern the operation of the computer are, of course, different from those that govern the behavior of the figures displayed on the screen. Moreover, like the implicate order of Bohm's model, the computer might be capable of many operations that in no way apparent upon examination of the game itself as it progresses on the screen."

"Error is a hardy plant; it flourisheth in every soil; In the heart of the wise and good, alike with the wicked and foolish; For there is no error so crooked, but it hath in it some lines of truth; Nor is any poison so deadly, that it serveth not some wholesome use."

"There is a limit to enjoyment, though the sources of wealth be boundless And the choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation."

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."

"A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."

"A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger of peace and love, a resting place for innocence on earth, a link between angels and men."

"God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love in all he doeth, Love, a brilliant fire, to gladden or consume: The wicked work their woe by looking upon love, and hating it: The righteous find their joys in yearning on its loveliness for ever."

"Tell me, ye that strive in vain to cramp and dwarf the soul, Wherefore should it cease to be, and when shall essence die?"

"If the mind is wearied by study, or the body worn with sickness, It is well to lie fallow for a while, in the vacancy of sheer amusement ; But when thou prosprest in health, and thine intellect can soar untired, To seek uninstructive pleasure is to slumber on the couch of indolence."

"Wait, thou child of hope, for Time shall teach thee all things."

"Clamorous pauperism feasteth While honest Labor, pining, hideth his sharp ribs."

"Who can wrestle against Sleep? — Yet is that giant very gentleness."

"Naples sitteth by the sea, keystone of an arch of azure, Crowned by consenting nations peerless queen of gayety: She laugheth at the wrath of Ocean, she mocketh the fury of Vesuvius, She spurneth disease, and misery, and famine, that crowd her sunny streets."

"O fair, false city, thou gay and gilded harlot! Wo for thy wanton heart, wo for thy wicked hardness! Wo unto thee, that the lightsomeness of life, beneath Italian suns, Should meet the solemnity of death, in a sepulchre so foul and fearful!"

"Away with false fashion, so calm and so chill, Where pleasure itself cannot please; Away with cold breeding, that faithlessly still Affects to be quite at its ease; For the deepest in feeling is highest in rank, The freest is first of the band, Nature's own Nobleman, friendly and frank, Is a man with his heart in his hand!"

"Fearless in honesty, gentle yet just, He warmly can love, and can hate; Nor will he bow down, with his face in the dust, To Fashion's intolerant state;"

"His fashion is passion, sincere and intense, — His impulse is simple and true; Yet temper'd by judgment, and taught by good sense, And cordial with me and with you."

"I am not old, — I cannot be old, Though threescore years and ten Have wasted away, like a tale that is told, The lives of other men: I am not old ; though friends and foes Alike have gone to their graves, And left me alone to my joys or my woes, As a rock in the midst of the waves."

"I am not old, — I cannot be old, Though tottering, wrinkled, and gray ; Though my eyes are dim, and my marrow is cold, Call me not old to-day."

"A dream, a dream, — it is all a dream, A strange, sad dream, good sooth; For old as I am, and old as I seem, My heart is full of youth."

"Eye hath not seen, tongue hath not told, And ear hath not heard it sung, How buoyant and bold, though it seem to grow old, Is the heart, forever young; — Forever young, — though life's old age Hath every nerve unstrung: The heart, the heart, is a heritage That keeps the old man young!"

"Never give up! it is wiser and better Always to hope, than once to despair. Fling off the load of Doubt's cankering fetter, And break the dark spell of tyrannical care."

"For life, good youth, hath never an ill Which hope cannot scatter, and faith cannot kill; And stubborn realities never shall bind The free-spreading wings of a cheerful mind."

"Who shall guess what I may be? Who can tell my fortune to me? For, bravest and brightest that ever was sung May be — and shall be — the lot of the young!"

"How gladly would I wander through some strange and savage land, The lasso at my saddle-bow, the rifle in my hand, A leash of gallant mastiffs bounding by my side, And, for a friend to love, the noble horse on which I ride! Alone, alone—yet not alone, for God is with me there, The tender hand of Providence shall guide me everywhere, While happy thoughts and holy hopes, as spirits calm and mild, Shall fan with their sweet wings the hermit-hunter of the wild!"

"Open the casement, and up with the Sun! His gallant journey is just begun; Over the hills his chariot is roll'd, Banner'd with glory, and burnish'd with gold,— Over the hills he comes sublime, Bridegroom of Earth, and brother of Time!"

"Hush,—for the halo of calmness is spreading Over my spirit as mild as a dove; Hush,—for the angel of comfort is shedding Over my body his vial of love; Hush,—for new slumbers are over me stealing, Thus would I court them again and again, Hush,—for my heart is intoxicate,—reeling In the swift waltz of my beautiful brain!"

"The dews of Hermon rest upon thee now, Fair saint and martyr! and yet once again Faith, hope and charity, like gracious rain, Fall on thy consecrated virgin brow."

"Rise! ye gallant youth of Britain, Gather to your country's call, On your hearts her name is written, Rise to help her, one and all!"

""Let byegones be byegones,”—they foolishly say, And bid me be wise and forget them; But old recollections are active to-day, And I can do nought but regret them; Though the present be pleasant, all joyous and gay, And promising well for the morrow, I love to look back on the years past away, Embalming my byegones in sorrow."

"When streams of unkindness, as bitter as gall, Bubble up from the heart to the tongue, And Meekness is writhing in torment and thrall, By the hands of Ingratitude wrung, — In the heat of injustice, unwept and unfair, While the anguish is festering yet, None, none but an angel or God can declare "I now can forgive and forget.""

"I wish you all the pleasurable excitement one can have without hurting others and one's own dignity."

"The psychogenesis of the adult make-up in civilized society cannot, therefore be understood if considered independently of the sociogenesis of our "civilization." ... Individuals, in their short history, pass once more through some of the processes that their society has traversed in its long history."

"If the present study has any significance at all, this results not least from its opposition to this mingling of what is and what ought to be, of scientific analysis with ideals."

"One of the peculiarities of the traditional human self-image is that people often speak and think of individuals and societies as if these were two phenomena existing separately—of which, moreover, one is often considered "real" and the other "unreal"—instead of two different aspects of the same human being."

"A heightened control of the affects, developed in society and learned by the individual, and above all a heightened degree of autonomous affect control, was needed in order for the world-picture centred on the earth and the people living on it to be overcome by one which, like the heliocentric world-picture, agreed better with the observable facts but was at first far less satisfying emotionally; for it removed human beings from their position at the centre of the universe and placed them on one of many planets circling about the centre."

"But at that particular stage in the development of these more object-related than self-related conceptual instruments for exploring extra-human nature, it was apparently not possible to include in the investigation, and to reflect upon, this civilizational shift itself, the move towards stronger and more "internalised" self-control that was taking place within people themselves. What was happening to human beings as they increased their understanding of nature remained at first inaccessible to scientific insight. It is not a little characteristic of this stage of self-consciousness that the classical theories of knowledge representing it are concerned far more with the problems of the object of knowledge than with the subject of knowledge, with object-perception than with self-perception."

"The development of the idea that the earth circles round the sun in a purely mechanical way in accordance with natural laws—that is, in a way not in the least determined by any purpose relating to mankind, and therefore no longer possessing any great emotional significance for people—presupposed and demanded at the same time a development in human beings themselves towards increased emotional control, a greater restraint of their spontaneous feeling that everything they experience and everything that concerns them takes its stamp from them, is the expression of an intention, a destiny, a purpose relating to themselves. Now, in the age that we call "modern", people have reached a stage of self-detachment that enables them to conceive of natural processes as an autonomous sphere operating in a purely mechanical or causal way without intention or purpose or destiny, and having a meaning or purpose for themselves only if they are in a position, through objective knowledge, to control it and thereby to give it a meaning and a purpose."

"These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world."

"The air in a man's lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived — Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses."

"I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together."

"The most modest research worker at his bench, pushing a probe into a neuron to measure the electric response when a light is flashed, is enmeshed in a huge and intertwined network of theories that he carries into his work from the whole field of science, all the way from Ohm’s law to Avogadro's number. He is not alone; he is sustained and held and in some sense imprisoned by the state of scientific theory in every branch. And what he finds is not a single fact either: it adds a thread to the network, ties a knot here and another there, and by these connections at once binds and enlarges the whole system."

"The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations between Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience."

"It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests. We have fallen into the habit of opposing the artistic to the scientific tempers; we even identify them with a creative and a critical approach."

"The sneer that science is only critical came from others. It was made by the timid and laboured artists of the nineties in order that they might by comparison appear to be creative and intuitive. Yet this finesse could not hide their own knowledge that the best minds were already being drawn to the more adventurous practice of the new sciences."

"Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge."

"Many people affect to believe that science has progressively strangled the arts, or distorted them into some unpleasant “modern” form; and therefore that the arts can be revived only by throwing over science. Often of course this is merely an elderly sentiment in favour of the art of our younger days, and the real scapegoat is not science but change."

"Science changes our values in two ways. It injects new ideas into the familiar culture. And it subjects it to the pressure of technical change, in the way I have just been describing, until the whole basis of our culture has imperceptibly been remade."

"Science and the arts shared the same language at the Restoration. They no longer seem to do so today. But the reason is that they share the same silence: they lack the same language. And it is the business of each of us to make that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in a common understanding."

"There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance."

"Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history."

"Newton was born during Cromwell’s revolution in the troubled 1640s; he was eighteen at the Restoration in 1660; and he published the Principia during the intrigues which ended by bringing William of Orange to England in the revolution of 1688. These are the moments when the powerful or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world."

"There has never been another moment in English history to equal the promise of that moment in the 1660’s when the Royal Society was formally founded. And though it was less dramatic elsewhere, it was a high moment throughout Europe."

"About 1660 therefore, Europe was in the course of a great revolution in thought. This was the Scientific Revolution, and it reached into all forms of culture. We sometimes speak as if science has step by step squeezed other interests out of our culture, and is slowly strangling the traditional ways of thinking. Nothing of the kind. The Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century was a universal revolution. Indeed it could not have begun unless there had already been a deep change in the attitude to everything natural and super-natural among thoughtful men."

"The great flood was the seventeenth century. That was the time of change, the hanging moment of instability in which men like Cromwell and Newton could remake the world."

"The whole structure of thought in the Middle Ages is one which we find hard to grasp today. It was an orderly structure, but the principles by which it was ordered seem to us now outlandish and meaningless."

"Nature does not provide identical objects; on the contrary, these are always human creations. What nature provides is a tree full of apples which are all recognisably alike and yet are not identical, small apples and large ones, red ones and pale ones, apples with maggots and apples without. To make a statement about all these apples together, and about crab-apples, Orange Pippins, and Beauties of Bath, is the whole basis of reasoning."

"This ability to order things into likes and unlikes is, I think, the foundation of human thought."

"On the one hand, all science, and indeed all thinking starts from and rests upon notions of order; what marks the Middle Ages is that their order was always a hierarchy. And on the other hand what marks the scientific view is not that it turned to the mechanism of causes, but that it saw the world as a mechanism at all—a machine of events."

"The Scientific Revolution revolution was a change from a world of things ordered according to their ideal nature, to a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after."

"Of these massive achievements I shall single out two. One is Newton’s working out of the concept of the cause, by making it over from its scholastic form in, say, St. Thomas Aquinas, to the modern form which now seems so obvious to us. This is one theme in this chapter. But I shall go to it by way of a related achievement, and to my mind one which is as remarkable: the marriage of the logical with the empirical method."

"In order to act in a scientific manner, in order to act in a human manner at all, two things are necessary: fact and thought. Science does not consist only a finding the facts; nor is it enough only to think, however rationally. The processes of science are characteristic of human action in that they move by the union of empirical fact and rational thought, in a way which cannot be disentangled."

"In Whitehead’s view, the Middle Ages were quite as logical in their speculations about nature as we are. It is not as rationalists that we have the advantage of them; our material successes stem from joining to their logic a ruthless appeal, at each bold deductive step, back to the hard empirical facts."

"The outlook before the Scientific Revolution was content with scholastic logic applied to a nature of hierarchies. The Scientific Revolution ended that: it linked the rational and the empirical, thought and fact, theory and practical experiment. And this has remained the content of science ever since."

"The [eighteenth] century settled down in two camps of Philistines: the literary Philistines and, largely to spite them, the scientific Philistines. It was the beginning of the mistaken opposition between them from which we still suffer."

"Order is the selection of one set of appearances rather than another because it gives a better sense of the reality behind the appearances."

"We cannot change our character, we can only enlarge it. If we are wise, then we go on learning all through life, and go on fitting what is new to what we have learnt before, piece by piece."

"The purpose of science is to describe the world in an orderly scheme or language which will help us to look ahead. We want to forecast what we can of the future behaviour of the world; particularly we want to forecast how it would behave under several alternative actions of our own between which we are usually trying to choose."

"Science is a way of describing reality; it is therefore limited by the limits of observation; and it asserts nothing which is outside observation. Anything else is not science; it is scholastics."

"Of course, everyone is free to prefer his favourite article of faith to the scientific, that is the empirical method. But do not let us imagine that his faith is then anything except a piece of comfortable and customary superstition. To try to make a nice distinction between what science can predict and what is somehow supernaturally determined is a piece of elegant but really quite shameless self-deception. Science is a practical study of what can be observed, and the prediction from that of what will be observed. To say that causes are somehow getting under this observable world, when anything under it is essentially unobservable, is neither helpful nor meaningful; it is just a piece of faithful comfort. We might as well say that the electrons are really pushed about by blue fairies with red noses who know exactly what they are doing, only it happens that every time we look in their direction these fairies instantly hide. If they are essentially unobservable, beyond all hope of future unravelling, then it simply does not make sense to bring them into any system, logical, metaphysical, or even religious."

"Life is not an examination; we do not get marks for the steps; what matters is getting the right answer. So it is perfectly possible to base a system of prediction on no principle except trying to get the right answer. This is exactly what all plants and animals do. The bat avoids obstacles by shouting at them that shrill cry just beyond my hearing, and then listens for the echo. Whatever system it has for translating the echo into a prediction it has found by evolution, and evolution has found it by trial and error."

"The laws of science have two functions, to be true and to be helpful; probably each of these functions includes the other. If the statistical law does both, that is all that can be asked of it. We may persuade ourselves that it is intellectually less satisfying than a causal law, and fails somehow to give us the same feeling of understanding the process of nature. But this is an illusion of habit."

"Science as we know it is indeed a creation of the last three hundred years. It has been made in and by the world that took its settled shape about 1660, when Europe at last shook off the long nightmare of religious wars and settled into a life of inquisitive trade and industry. Science is embodied in those new societies; it has been made by them and has helped to make them."

"The mastery and the greatness of science rests in the end on this, that here the rational and the empirical are knotted together. Science is fact and thought giving strength to one another."

"We do not construct the world from our experiences; we are aware of the world in our experiences."

"We are troubled by a two-sidedness in our own behaviour, where one side is what we have long been taught to value, and the other is worldly success. We are faced every day with actions of which our own code of conduct makes us ashamed, but which we find compelling if we are to battle with the hard facts of society. We do not consciously blame science for this rift until it throws out some unavoidable challenge, such as in our time has been set by the atomic bomb. But that sharp issue is merely a symbol. Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: how are we to choose between that which we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?"

"There has never been a great book or a powerful work of art which has not been thought immoral by those with an older tradition."

"There is indeed no system of morality which does not set a high value on truth and on knowledge, above all on a conscious knowledge of oneself. It is therefore at least odd that science should be called amoral, and this by people who in their own lives set a high value on being truthful. For whatever else may be held against science, this cannot be denied, that it takes for ultimate judgment one criterion alone, that it shall be truthful."

"At bottom, we have remain individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms."

"If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science."

"A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it."

"Science is a great many things, and I have called them a great many names; but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think."

"Here is the ultimate hope of saving ourselves from extinction. We must learn to understand that the contents of all knowledge is empirical; that its test is whether it works; and we must learn to act on that understanding in the world as well as in the laboratory."

"I have seen in my lifetime an abyss open in the human mind: a gulf between the endeavour to be man, and the relish in being brute. The scientist has indeed had a hand in this, and every other specialist too, with his prim detachment and his oracular airs. But of course, the large strain which has opened this fault is social. We have made men live in two halves, a Sunday half and a workday one. We have ordered them to love their neighbor and to turn the other cheek, in a society which has constantly compelled them to shoulder their neighbor aside and to turn their backs. So we have created a savage sense of failure which, as we now know to our cost, can be tapped with an ease which is frightening; and which can thrust up, with explosive force, a symbol to repeat to an unhappy people its most degrading dream."

"Can science heal that neurotic flaw in us? If science cannot, then nothing can. Let us stop pretending. There is no cure in high moral precepts. We have preached them too long to men who are forced to live how they can: that makes the strain which they have not been able to bear. We need an ethic which is moral and which works. It is often said that science has destroyed our values and put nothing in their place. What has really happened of course is that science has shown in harsh relief the division between our values and our world. We have not begun to let science get into our heads; where then was it supposed to create these values?"

"The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art."

"Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her."

"We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them."

"Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's."

"The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry."

"In effect what Luther said in 1517 was that we may appeal to a demonstrable work of God, the Bible, to override any established authority. The Scientific Revolution begins when Nicolaus Copernicus implied the bolder proposition that there is another work of God to which we may appeal even beyond this: the great work of nature. No absolute statement is allowed to be out of reach of the test, that its consequence must conform to the facts of nature. The habit of testing and correcting the concept by its consequences in experience has been the spring within the movement of our civilization ever since. In science and in art and in self-knowledge we explore and move constantly by turning to the world of sense to ask, Is this so? This is the habit of truth, always minute yet always urgent, which for four hundred years has entered every action of ours; and has made our society and the value it sets on man."

"No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh."

"Positivists and analysts alike believe that the words is and ought belong to different worlds, so that sentences which are constructed with is usually have verifiable meaning, but sentences constructed with ought never have. This is because Ludwig Wittgenstein's unit, and Bertrand Russell's unit, is one man; all British empiricist philosophy is individualist. And it is of course clear that if the only criterion of true and false which a man accepts is that man's, then he has no base for social agreement. The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer."

"There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so."

"Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime."

"Tolerance among scientists cannot be based on indifference, it must be based on respect. Respect as a personal value implies, in any society, the public acknowledgements of justice and of due honor. These are values which to the layman seem most remote from any abstract study. Justice, honor, the respect of man for man: What, he asks, have these human values to do with science? [...] Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not."

"Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her — than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all."

"The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things."

"The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow, and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined.An icy sweetness fills my mind, A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring."

"Dissent is the mark of freedom."

"There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society."

"The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. I have used three words to describe these far - reaching changes : discovery, invention and creation. There are contexts in which one of these words is more appropriate than the others."

"Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidently as on the West Indies."

"A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art..."

"To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man."

"To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements."

"With the... symbolic memory we spell out the future—not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another."

"I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind's eye as a visual organ. An image in my usage is what Charles Pierce called a sign..."

"[T]he most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols. ...[E]volution has greatly enlarged the front lobes of the human brain, which govern the sense of the past and the future; and... they are probably the seat of our other images."

"The images play out for us events which are not present in our senses, and... create the future—a future that... may never come to exist in that form."

"Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye."

"The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay..."

"Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head... the rational manipulation... as well as the literary and artistic manipulation."

"When a child begins to play games... he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together."

"[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight... induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized."

"The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional."

"All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!""

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or s."

"[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction."

"When a man counts one, two, three, he is not only doing mathematics, he is on the path to the mysticism of numbers in Pythagoras and Vitruvius and Kepler, to the Trinity and the signs of the Zodiac."

"[I]magination... is the faculty... the common root from which science and literature... spring and grow and flourish together. ...the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts... [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another... without asking... to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. ...When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible."

"Let me end with... man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon. ...Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with... fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas... wrote... '... wrote... The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy... they all tried to guess where... earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—... the wrong law. All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he... came to conceive... that the moon is like a ball... thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon... he went on to calculate how long... the distant moon would take to round the earth... [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony."

"In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world. It is frozen in the statues of Easter Island that put a stop to time—and in the medieval clocks of Europe that once also seemed to say the last word about the heavens for ever. Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man. But in retrospect, what commands our attention as much are the continuities—the thoughts that run or recur from one civilization to another."

"Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created."

"In a parched African landscape like this at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground. That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man."

"Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history, and instead speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began 10,000 years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that, we saw, in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower... That is the beginning of war."

"One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable. There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientist or dogmatist, open the door to tragedy. All knowledge, all information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility."

"The symbol of the University is the iron statue outside the Rathskeller of a barefoot goose girl that every student kisses at graduation. The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it."

"The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty."

"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people."

"Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist."

"And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us."

"The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation."

"We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man."

"Since the word "knowledge" occurs in my general title... I am going to be talking about epistemology, although I prefer to use the eighteenth-century, indeed, medieval phrase, "natural philosophy." ...that enterprise of the human mind which attempts to trace lawfulness to nature, dead and living, but which is not directed to specific inquiries into how this or that law works. Philosophy in the sense in which I practice it, natural philosophy, is concerned with lawfulness rather than with laws and the general nature of laws rather than with the specific structure of this or that law. Natural philosophy was one of the three topics (moral philosophy and metaphysical philosophy were the others) to which one graduated in medieval universities after having studied the seven liberal arts. I believe that we need to review the whole of our natural philosophy in the light of scientific knowledge that has arisen in the last fifty years."

"What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine."

"I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. ...It is... an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into... relevant and... irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment... into a box. ...the moment we do that, we do violence to the connections ...I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. ...I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. ...it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, when we practice science (and this is true of all our experience) we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness."

"Let me close by reminding you of what Newton actually did on the day that he conceived G = k \frac{mm'}{r^2}. ...Newton did not have any subsidies, grants, funds, Secret Service money. But he had the moon. He said, "... I cannot throw a ball round the world, but let me picture the moon as if it were a ball which has been flung around the world... How long will it take to go round the world?" ...He knew the value of gravity at the earth's surface ...but he did not know the value of the earth's gravity for the moon. He said, "Let us suppose that it is given by an inverse square law. Now, how long will it take the moon to go around?" It comes out at twenty-eight days. As Newton said, "They agreed pretty nearly.""

"Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. ...it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. ...by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors."

"[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now."

"The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary."

"Human beings can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes... because they make and hold in their minds images for absent things."

"When a child... discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks into a new life. ...seeing situations that do not exist. ...in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. ...play ...frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world... They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them."

"The ability... to experiment with imaginary situations, gives man a freedom... the pleasure in trying out and exploring imaginary situations. A child's play is concerned with this pleasure; and so is much of art, and much of science... [P]ure science... is a form of play, in this sense."

"He first became familiar to the British public through appearances on the BBC television version of The Brains Trust in the late 1950s, but is better known for his... series The Ascent of Man (1973). This was an inspiration for Carl Sagan to make Cosmos in 1980. During the making of The Ascent of Man he was interviewed by Michael Parkinson, and Bronowski's description of a visit to Auschwitz—he had lost many family members during the Nazi era—was described by Parkinson as one of his most memorable interviews. ...Bronowski died of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York a year after The Ascent of Man was completed, and was buried in the western side of London's ..."

"[[Richard von Mises|[V]on Mises]] and raised the objection that in Reichenbach's theory a theory was said to be "valid with a probability of 70%," if 70 per cent of the conclusions of the theory were confirmed by experiment. However, we know... a theory which is in disagreement with experience in 30% of... experiments is called "false" or "wrong." We come to the same conclusion if we apply Carnap's "." An attempt to avoid these difficulties and to advance a radically different approach... was made by Jacob Bronowski. His purpose was to formalize the criterion for the validity of a theory that was advocated by men like John Frederick Herschel and William Whewell. ...these scientists and philosophers saw the main achievement of a theory in its unifying and simplifying power. The simpler the theory... the more probable the theory. If the theory consists in a complete enumeration of all observable facts, the "theory" would have a very high probability... However, von Mises and Bronowski rejected this... If we have two theories which yield the same observable facts, the scientist prefers the... more economical or just simpler. Bronowski compares the scientific theory with a code... We prefer the code which is more practical, more efficient. ...to improve the code, we try systematically... "to break down the code into its constituent symbols and their laws of arrangement." ...If we break down [chemical] elements into... elementary particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) and the forces acting between them, we have a code which describes... the interaction between hydrogen and oxygen... from which can be derived much more information than from any theory in which "oxygen" and "hydrogen"...occur as primitive symbols. ...Bronowski calls a theory the more probable, the more the code... is broken down into constituent symbols and laws of arrangement."

"Every acceptance of a debatable theory is due to a compromise between Reichenbach's and Bronowski's criteria: agreement with facts and efficiency as a code."

"The criteria of Reichenbach and Carnap, which are based, like John Stuart Mill's inductive logic, upon agreement with observations, have to be complemented by the criterion of economy and simplicity which was advanced in the history of science by men like William Ockham, Isaac Newton, and Ernst Mach. In out twentieth century, the importance of criteria other than mere agreement with observation was stressed by von Mises and Bronowski."

"The ashes of millions of people were flushed into the pond at Auschwitz, but on that sunny day... I stood at its edge... twenty-four years earlier I sat in front of our television set and watched... Bronowski... as a scientist, a human being, a survivor and a witness at the edge of this pond. Many members of his family had died at Auschwitz. He reminded us that it is said that science will turn people into numbers and told... passionately that this is '...tragically false', and that it was here... that people were turned into numbers and murdered not by the gas... but by the arrogance, the dogma and ignorance... and by the murderers'... belief that they possessed absolute knowledge... never—unlike scientists—tested... against objective reality. ...Bronowski ...reminded us that science is a very human form of knowledge in which every judgement stands on the edge of error and is personal. Quoting the words of Oliver Cromwell—'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken'—he reached into the water... telling us that we must close the distance between the push-button order and the human act... ending with the words: 'We have to touch people.' ...Bronowski's active defiance of failings such as despair, failing of nerve, fashionable pessimism and irresponsibility had made a permanent and indelible impression on me..."

"We have been twenty years engaged in the two most expensive wars that Europe ever saw. The whole burthen of this charge has lain upon the landed interest during the whole time. The men of estates have, generally speaking, neither served in the fleets nor armies, nor meddled in the public funds, and management of the treasure. A new interest has been created out of their fortunes, and a sort of property, which was not known twenty years ago, is now encreased to be almost equal to the terra firma of our island. The consequences of all this is, that the landed men are become poor and dispirited. They either abandon all thoughts of the publick, turn arrant farmers, and improve the estates they have left: or else they seek to repair their shattered fortunes by listing at court, or under the heads of partys. In the mean while those men are become their masters, who formerly would with joy have been their servants."

"Though the condition of France by evident tokens appears to be miserable, yet their ill circumstances are certainly exaggerated in our accounts. I doubt, we may add that our own state is not much better than our enemy's, and that an unseasonable harvest would reduce our people to the same misery as we triumph over. Peace is as much our interest as theirs. I am so firmly persuaded of this, that I will continue to hope the winter may ripen this glorious fruit, which the summer could not. As to the conditions of this peace, it is melancholy to reflect, that those articles you speak of, which will in their consequence devolve so prodigious a power on Holland, seem to be agreed on all sides; whilst the single principle on which we engaged in the war, remaines the only point in dispute."

"You may observe yourself...what a difference there is between the true strength of this nation and the fictitious one of the Whigs. How much time, how many lucky incidents, how many strains of power, how much money must go to create a majority of the latter; on the other hand, take but off the opinion that the Crown is another way inclined, the church interest rises with redoubled force, and by its natural genuine strength."

"A peace must be had; and all mankind sees plainly now, in how vile a manner former opportunities were neglected of making a better than at this hour we have reason to expect."

"[I]t is a pretty shocking observation that the Queen is to be the guarantee for a loan of this extraordinary nature made by the Dutch, and especially at a time, when under pretence of disability they directly refuse to furnish their quotas for the sea service, in spight of the obligations of all sorts, which lye upon them to do otherwise."

"Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense."

"We are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things."

"I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples."

"Nations, like men, have their infancy."

"They (Thucydides and Xenophon) maintained the dignity of history."

"The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it."

"Our world seems to be, in many respects, the bedlam of every other system of intelligent creatures."

"The second proposition admits and encourages the very practice we censure so justly, for which the saint [ Augustine of Hippo ] was so famous, and by which he contributed so much to promote contentions in his own days, and to perpetuate them to ours. The practice of deducing doctrines from the scriptures that are not evidently contained in them... Who does not see that the direct tendency of this practice is exactly the same as the event has proved it to be? It composes and propagates a religion, seemingly under the authority of God, but really under that of man. The principles of revelation are lost in theology, or disfigured by it: and whilst some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious... They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn."

"It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word."

"The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them."

"The manners of our fore-fathers were, I believe, in many respects better: they had more probity perhaps, they had certainly more show of honour, and greater industry."

"One party [the Whigs] had given their whole attention, during several years, to the project of enriching themselves, and impoverishing the rest of the nation; and, by these and other means, of establishing their dominion under the government and with the favour of a family, who were foreigners, and therefore might believe, that they were established on the throne by the good will and strength of this party alone. This party in general were so intent on these views, and many of them, I fear, are so still, that they did not advert in time to the necessary consequences of the measures they abetted: nor did they consider, that the power they raised, and by which they hoped to govern their country, would govern them with the very rod of iron they forged, and would be the power of a prince or minister, not that of a party long."

"Another party [the Tories] continued sour, sullen, and inactive, with judgments so weak, and passions so strong, that even experience, and a severe one surely, was lost upon them. They waited, like the Jews, for a Messiah, that may never come; and under whom, if he did come, they would be strangely disappointed in their expectations of glory and triumph, and universal dominion. Whilst they waited, they were marked out like the Jews, a distinct race, hewers of wood and drawers of water, scarce members of the community, tho born in the country."

"The service of our country is no chimerical, but a real duty. He who admits the proofs of any other moral duty, drawn from the constitution of human nature, or from the moral fitness and unfitness of things, must admit them in favour of this duty, or be reduced to the most absurd inconsistency."

"To what higher station, to what greater glory can any mortal aspire, than to be, during the whole course of his life, the support of good, the controul of bad government, and the guardian of public liberty?"

"Neither Montaigne in writing his essays, nor DesCartes in building new worlds, nor Burnet in framing an antedeluvian earth, no nor Newton in discovering and establishing the true laws of nature on experiment and a sublimer geometry, felt more intellectual joys; than he feels who is a real patriot, who bends all the force of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions, to the good of his country."

"My Lord, I have insisted the more on this duty which men owe to their country, because I came out of England, and continue still, strongly affected with what I saw when I was there. Our government has approached, nearer than ever before, to the true principles of it, since the revolution of one thousand six hundred and eighty eight: and the accession of the present family to the throne, has given the fairest opportunities, as well as the justest reasons, for compleating the scheme of liberty, and improving it to perfection."

"[N]o human institution can arrive at perfection, and the most that human wisdom can do, is to procure the same or greater good, at the expence of less evil."

"There have been periods when our government continued free, with strong appearances of becoming absolute. Let it be your glory, my Lord, and that of the new generation springing up with you, that this government do not become absolute at any future period, with the appearances of being free."

"I think, and every wise and honest man in generations yet unborn will think, if the history of [thi]s administration descends to blacken our annals, that the greatest iniquity of the minister [Robert Walpole], on whom the whole iniquity ought to be charged, since he has been so long in possession of the whole power, is the constant endeavour he has employed to corrupt the morals of men."

"The minister [Robert Walpole] preaches corruption aloud and constantly, like an impudent missionary of vice."

"It seems to me, upon the whole matter, that to save or redeem a nation under such circumstances from perdition, nothing less is necessary than some great, some extraordinary conjuncture of ill fortune, or of good, which may purge, yet so as by fire. Distress from abroad, bankruptcy at home, and other circumstances of like nature and tendency, may beget universal confusion. Out of confusion order may arise: but it may be the order of a wicked tyranny, instead of the order of a just monarchy. Either may happen: and such an alternative, at the disposition of fortune, is sufficient to make a stoic tremble! We may be saved indeed by means of a very different kind; but these means will not offer themselves, this way of salvation will not be opened to us, without the concurrence, and the influence of a PATRIOT KING, the most uncommon of all phænomena in the physical or moral world. Nothing can so surely and so effectually restore the virtue and public spirit, essential to the preservation of liberty, and national prosperity, as the reign of such a prince."

"I esteem monarchy above any other form of government, and hereditary monarchy above elective. I reverence kings, their office, their rights, their persons; and it will never be owing to the principles I am going to establish, because the character and government of a patriot king can be established on no other, if their office and their right are not always held divine, and their persons always sacred."

"The obligation of submission to both, is discoverable by so clear and so simple an use of our intellectual faculties, that it may be said properly enough to be revealed to us by God; and tho both these laws cannot be said properly to be given by Him, yet our obligation to submit to the civil law is a principal paragraph in the natural law, which he has most manifestly given us."

"It follows, therefore, that he who breaks the laws of his country resists the ordinance of God, that is, the law of his nature. God has instituted neither monarchy, nor aristocracy, nor democracy, nor mixed government: but tho God has instituted no particular form of government among men, yet by the general laws of his kingdom, he exacts our obedience to the laws of those communities to which each of us is attached by birth, or to which we may be attached by a subsequent and lawful engagement."

"Nothing can be more absurd, in pure speculation, than an hereditary right in any mortal to govern other men: and yet, in practice, nothing can be more absurd than to have a king to choose at every vacancy of a throne. We draw at a lottery indeed in one case, where there are many chances to lose, and few to gain. But have we much more advantage of this kind in the other? I think not. Upon these, and upon most occasions, the multitude would do at least as well to trust to chance as choice, and to their fortune as to their judgment."

"To conclude this head therefore, as I think a limited monarchy the best of governments, so I think an hereditary monarchy the best of monarchies. I said a limited monarchy; for an unlimited monarchy, wherein arbitrary will, which is in truth no rule, is however the sole rule, or stands instead of all rule of government, is so great an absurdity, both in reason informed or uninformed by experience, that it seems a government fitter for savages than for civilized people."

"Among many reasons which determine me to prefer monarchy to every form of government, this is a principal one. When monarchy is the essential form, it may be more easily and more usefully tempered with aristocracy or democracy, or both, than either of them, when they are the essential forms, can be tempered with monarchy. It seems to me, that the introduction of a real permanent monarchical power, or any thing more than the pageantry of it, into either of these, must destroy them and extinguish them, as a great light extinguishes a less. Where it may easily be shewn, and the true form of our government will demonstrate, without seeking any other example, that very considerable aristocratical and democratical powers may be grafted on a monarchical stock, without diminishing the lustre, or restraining the power and authority of the prince, enough to alter in any degree the essential form."

"There must be an absolute, unlimited, and uncontroulable power lodged somewhere in every government; but to constitute monarchy, or the government of a single person, it is not necessary that this power should be lodged in the monarch alone."

"There are limitations indeed that would destroy the essential form of monarchy: or, in other words, a monarchical constitution may be changed, under pretence of limiting the monarch. This happened among us in the last century, when the vilest usurpation, and the most infamous tyranny, were established over our nation, by some of the worst and some of the meanest men in it. I will not say, that the essential form of monarchy should be preserved, tho the preservation of it were to cause the loss of liberty. Salus reipsuprema lex esto, is a fundamental law: and sure I am, the safety of a commonwealth is ill provided for, if the liberty be given up. But this I presume to say, and can demonstrate, that all the limitations necessary to preserve liberty, as long as the spirit of it subsists, and longer than that, no limitations of monarchy, nor any other form of government, can preserve it, are compatible with monarchy."

"My aim is to fix this principle, that limitations on a crown ought to be carried as far as it is necessary to secure the liberties of a people; and that all such limitations may subsist, without weakening or endangering monarchy."

"As soon as corruption ceases to be an expedient of government, and it will cease to be such as soon as a patriot king is raised to the throne, the panacea is applied: the spirit of the constitution revives of course; and as fast as it revives, the orders and forms of the constitution are restored to their primitive integrity, and become what they were intended to be; real barriers against arbitrary power, not blinds nor masks under which tyranny may lie concealed. Depravation of manners exposed the constitution to ruin; reformation will secure it."

"A patriot king is the most powerful of all reformers; for he is himself a sort of standing miracle, so rarely seen and so little understood, that the sure effects of his appearance will be admiration and love in every honest breast, confusion and terror to every guilty conscience, but submission and resignation in all. A new people will seem to arise with a new king. In numerable metamorphoses, like those which poets feign, will happen in very deed: and while men are conscious that they are the same individuals, the difference of their sentiments will almost persuade them that they are changed into different beings."

"By the principles of the Revolution, a subject may resist, no doubt, the prince who endeavours to ruin and enslave his people, and may push this resistance to the dethronement and exclusion of him and his race: but will it follow, that, because we may justly take arms against a prince whose right to govern we once acknowledged, and who by subsequent acts has forfeited that right, we may swear to a right we do not acknowledge, and resist a prince whose conduct has not forfeited the right we swore to, nor given any just dispensation from our oaths?"

"The situation of Great Britain, the character of her people, and the nature of her government fit her for trade and commerce. Her climate and her soil make them necessary to her well being. By trade and commerce we grew a rich and powerful nation, and by their decay we are growing poor and impotent. As trade and commerce enrich, so they fortify our country. The sea is our barrier, ships are our fortresses, and the mariners, that trade and commerce alone can furnish, are the garrisons to defend them."

"The French may improve their natural wealth and power by the improvement of trade and commerce. We can have no wealth, nor power by consequence, as Europe is now constituted, without the improvement of them, nor in any degree but proportionably to this improvement."

"The result of what has been said is, in general, that the wealth and power of all nations depending so much on their trade and commerce, and every nation being...in such different circumstances of advantage or disadvantage in the pursuit of this common interest; a good government, and therefore the government of a patriot king, will be directed constantly to make the most of every advantage that nature has given, or art can procure towards the improvement of trade and commerce. And this is one of the principal criterions, by which we are to judge whether governors are in the true interest of the people, or not. It results, in particular, that Great Britain might improve her wealth and power in a proportion superior to that of any nation who can be deemed her rival, if the advantages she has were as wisely cultivated, as they will be in the reign of a patriot king."

"A patriot king will neither neglect, nor sacrifice his country's interest. No other interest, neither a foreign nor a domestic, neither a public nor a private, will influence his conduct in government... To give ease and encouragement to manufactory at home, to assist and protect trade abroad, to improve and keep in heart the national colonies, like so many farms of the mother-country, will be principal and constant parts of the attention of such a prince."

"By a continual attention to improve her natural, that is her maritime strength, by collecting all her forces with in herself, and reserving them to be laid out on great occasions, such as regard her immediate interests and her honour, or such as are truly important to the general system of power in Europe; she may be the arbitrator of differences, the guardian of liberty, and the preserver of that Balance, which has been so much talked of, and is so little understood."

"Like other amphibious animals, we must come occasionally on shore: but the water is more properly our element, and in it, like them, as we find our greatest security, so we exert our greatest force."

"In his place, concord will appear, brooding peace and prosperity on the happy land; joy fitting in every face, content in every heart; a people unoppressed, undisturbed, unalarmed; busy to improve their private property and the public stock; fleets covering the ocean; bringing home wealth by the returns of industry; carrying assistance or terror abroad by the direction of wisdom; and asserting triumphantly the right and the honour of Great Britain, as far as waters roll and as winds can waft them. Those who live to see such happy days, and to act in so glorious a scene, will perhaps call to mind with some tenderness of sentiment, when he is no more, a man, who contributed his mite to carry on so good a work, and who desired life for nothing so much, as to see a king of Great Britain the most popular man in his country, and a patriot king at the head of an united people."

"Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? ... I do not often quote Bolingbroke, nor have his works in general, left any permanent impression on my mind. He is a presumptuousness and a superficial writer. But he has one observation, which in my opinion, is not without depth and solidity. He says, that he prefers a monarchy to other governments; because you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than any thing of monarchy upon the republican forms. I think him perfectly in the right."

"He engaged young, and distinguished himself in business; and his penetration was almost intuition. I am old enough to have heard him speak in parliament. And I remember that, though prejudiced against him by party, I felt all the force and charms of his eloquence. Like Belial in Milton, “he made the worse appear the better cause.” All the internal and external advantages and talents of an orator are undoubtedly his. Figure, voice, elocution, knowledge, and, above all, the purest and most florid diction, with the justest metaphors and happiest images, had raised him to the post of Secretary at War, at four-and-twenty years old, an age at which others are hardly thought fit for the smallest employments."

"Lord Bolingbroke, one of the ablest men who ever lived, was a firm and uncompromising Tory, and he advocated triennial Parliaments. He said that without this there was no security for the people, no integrity for the constitution."

"Bolingbroke was typical not only in his attempt to define the true interests of the state but also in his use of the analogy between the political society and the family to assert that not unity but discord was the natural relationship between states. The personal needs of men were met by the development of society out of the family. Self-love, which originally assisted this development and produced separate societies, then ensured that the development would spread no further. "The great commonwealth of mankind cannot be brought under one government, nor subsist without any." As Bolingbroke used these views to make himself an early advocate of a maritime, insular, colonial Great Britain, intervening in European affairs only when her interest in the balance of power required it, so the continental writers of his time completely abandoned the traditional belief in Christendom or Europe as a structure above or at least additional to its component states."

"He was called indeed a tory; but his writings prove him a stronger advocate for liberty than any of his countrymen, the whigs of the present day. Irritated by his exile, he committed one act unworthy of him, in connecting himself momentarily with a prince rejected by his country. But he redeemed that single act by his establishment of the principles which proved it to be wrong... Lord Bolingbroke's...is a style of the highest order. The lofty, rhythmical, full-flowing eloquence of Cicero. Periods of just measure, their members proportioned, their close full and round. His conceptions, too, are bold and strong, his diction copious, polished and commanding as his subject. His writings are certainly the finest samples in the English language, of the eloquence proper for the Senate. His political tracts are safe reading for the most timid religionist, his philosophical, for those who are not afraid to trust their reason with discussions of right and wrong."

"Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Laugh when we must, be candid when you can, And vindicate the ways of God to man."

"I think Mr. secretary St. John the greatest young man I ever knew: wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of apprehension, good learning, and an excellent taste; the best orator in the house of commons, admirable conversation, good nature, and good manners; generous, and a despiser of money. His only fault is, talking to his friends in way of complaint of too great load of business, which looks a little like affectation; and he endeavours too much to mix the fine gentleman, and the man of pleasure, with the man of business. What truth and sincerity he may have, I know not."

"[T]he accomplishments of his mind, which was adorned with the choicest gifts that God has yet thought fit to bestow upon the children of men; a strong memory, a clear judgment, a vast range of wit and fancy, a thorough comprehension, an invincible eloquence, with a most agreeable elocution."

"With the signing of the Treaties of Utrecht, Bolingbroke's one great achievement in the world of action was accomplished. The rest of his political career, after a Niagara leap into rebellion, was to be lost in shallows and in miseries. But he stands in history as the man who, by courses however devious and questionable, negotiated a Peace which proved in the working more satisfactory than any other that has ended a general European conflict in modern times."

"All existing things upon this earth, which have knowledge of their own existence, possess, some in one degree and some in another, the power of thought, accompanied by perception, which is the awakening of thought by the effects of external objects upon the senses."

"There never has been, and till we see it we never shall believe that there can be, a system of geometry worthy of the name, which has any material departures (we do not speak of corrections or extensions or developments) from the plan laid down by Euclid."

"The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination."

"We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of exact science are mathematics and logic: the mathematical sect puts out the logical eye, the logical sect puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it can see better with one eye than with two."

"I did not hear what you said, but I absolutely disagree with you."

"The two races which have founded the mathematics, those of the Sanscrit and Greek languages, have been the two which have independently formed systems of logic."

"They [the English] forget that at this moment there still exists [in India] a body of literature and science which might well be the nucleus of a new civilisation, though every trace of Christian and Mohammedan civilization were blotted out of existence."

"The number of mathematical students, increased as it has been of late years, would be much augmented if those who hold the highest rank in science would condescend to give more effective assistance in clearing the elements of the difficulties which they present. If any one claiming that title should think my attempt obscure or enormus, he must share the blame with me, since it is through his neglect that I have been enabled to avail myself of an opportunity to perform a task which I would gladly have seen confided to more skilful hands."

"The Object of this Treatise is—(1) To point out to the student of Mathematics, who has not the advantage of a tutor, the course of study which it is most advisable that he should follow, the extent to which he should pursue one part of the science before he commences another, and to direct him as to the sort of applications which he should make. (2) To treat fully of the various points which involve difficulties and which are apt to be misunderstood by beginners, and to describe at length the nature without going into the routine of the operations."

"In order to see the difference which exists between... studies,—for instance, history and geometry, it will be useful to ask how we come by knowledge in each. Suppose, for example, we feel certain of a fact related in history... if we apply the notions of evidence which every-day experience justifies us in entertaining, we feel that the improbability of the contrary compels us to take refuge in the belief of the fact; and, if we allow that there is still a possibility of its falsehood, it is because this supposition does not involve absolute absurdity, but only extreme improbability. In mathematics the case is wholly different... and the difference consists in this—that, instead of showing the contrary of the proposition asserted to be only improbable, it proves it at once to be absurd and impossible. This is done by showing that the contrary of the proposition which is asserted is in direct contradiction to some extremely evident fact, of the truth of which our eyes and hands convince us. In geometry, of the principles alluded to, those which are most commonly used are— I. If a magnitude is divided into parts, the whole is greater than either of those parts. II. Two straight lines cannot inclose a space. III. Through one point only one straight line can be drawn, which never meets another straight line, or which is parallel to it. It is on such principles as these that the whole of geometry is founded, and the demonstration of every proposition consists in proving the contrary of it to be inconsistent with one of these."

"There is a mistake into which several have fallen, and have deceived others, and perhaps themselves, by clothing some false reasoning in what they called a mathematical dress, imagining that by the application of mathematical symbols to their subject, they secured mathematical argument. This could not have happened if they had possessed a knowledge of the bounds within which the empire of mathematics is contained. That empire is sufficiently wide, and might have been better known, had the time which has been wasted in aggressions upon the domains of others, been spent in exploring the immense tracts which are yet untrodden."

"The lowest steps of the ladder are as useful as the highest."

"Although there is no study which presents so simple a beginning as that of geometry, there is none in which difficulties grow more rapidly as we proceed, and what may appear at first rather paradoxical, the more acute the student the more serious will the impediments in the way of his progress appear. This necessarily follows in a science which consists of reasoning from the very commencement, for it is evident that every student will feel a claim to have his objections answered, not by authority, but by argument, and that the intelligent student will perceive more readily than another the force of an objection and the obscurity arising from an unexplained difficulty, as the greater is the ordinary light the more will occasional darkness be felt. To remove some of these difficulties is the principal object of this Treatise."

"A finished or even a competent reasoner is not the work of nature alone... education develops faculties which would otherwise never have manifested their existence. It is, therefore, as necessary to learn to reason before we can expect to be able to reason, as it is to learn to swim or fence, in order to attain either of those arts. Now, something must be reasoned upon, it matters not much what it is, provided that it can be reasoned upon with certainty. The properties of mind or matter, or the study of languages, mathematics, or natural history may be chosen for this purpose. Now, of all these, it is desirable to choose the one... in which we can find out by other means, such as measurement and ocular demonstration of all sorts, whether the results are true or not. ..Now the mathematics are peculiarly well adapted for this purpose, on the following grounds:— 1. Every term is distinctly explained, and has but one meaning, and it is rarely that two words are employed to mean the same thing. 2. The first principles are self-evident, and, though derived from observation, do not require more of it than has been made by children in general. 3. The demonstration is strictly logical, taking nothing for granted except the self-evident first principles, resting nothing upon probability, and entirely independent of authority and opinion. 4. When the conclusion is attained by reasoning, its truth or falsehood can be ascertained, in geometry by actual measurement, in algebra by common arithmetical calculation. This gives confidence, and is absolutely necessary, if... reason is not to be the instructor, but the pupil. 5. There are no words whose meanings are so much alike that the ideas which they stand for may be confounded. ...These are the principal grounds on which... the utility of mathematical studies may be shewn to rest, as a discipline for the reasoning powers. But the habits of mind which these studies have a tendency to form are valuable in the highest degree. The most important of all is the power of concentrating the ideas which a successful study of them increases where it did exist, and creates where it did not. A difficult position or a new method of passing from one proposition to another, arrests all the attention, and forces the united faculties to use their utmost exertions. The habit of mind thus formed soon extends itself to other pursuits, and is beneficially felt in all the business of life."

"The work now before the reader is the most extensive which our language contains on the subject."

"My specific... object has been to contain, within the prescribed limits, the whole of the student's course, from the confines of elementary algebra and trigonometry, to the entrance of the highest works on mathematical physics. A learner who has a good knowledge of the subjects just named, and who can master the present treatise, taking up elementary works on conic sections, application of algebra to geometry, and the theory of equations, as he wants them, will, I am perfectly sure, find himself able to conquer the difficulties of anything he may meet with; and need not close any book of Laplace, Lagrange, Legendre, Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy, Gauss, Abel, Hindenburgh and his followers. or of any one of our English mathematicians, under the idea that it is too hard for him."

"If much difficulty should be experienced in the elementary chapters, I know of no work which I can so confidently recommend to be used with the present one, as that of M. Duhamel."

"...nor have I found occasion to depart from the plan... the rejection of the whole doctrine of series in the establishment of the fundamental parts both of the Differential and Integral Calculus. The method of Lagrange... had taken deep root in elementary works; it was the sacrifice of the clear and indubitable principle of limits to a phantom, the idea that an algebra without limits was purer than one in which that notion was introduced. But, independently of the idea of limits being absolutely necessary even to the proper conception of a convergent series, it must have been obvious enough to Lagrange himself, that all application of the science to concrete magnitude, even in his own system, required the theory of limits."

"I... subjoin references to those parts of the work for which I have not been indebted to my knowledge of what has been written before me: much of what is cited is probably not new, indeed it is dangerous for any one at the present day to claim anything as belonging to himself; several things which I once thought to have entered in this list have been since found (either by myself, or by a friend to whom I referred it) in preceding writers."

"It is not true, out of geometry, that the mathematical sciences are, in all their parts those models of finished accuracy which many suppose. The extreme boundaries of analysis have always been as imperfectly understood as the tract beyond the boundaries was absolutely unknown. But the way to enlarge the settled country has not been by keeping within it, but by making voyages of discovery, and I am perfectly convinced that the student should be exercised in this manner; that is, that he should be taught how to examine the boundary, as well as how to cultivate the interior. ...allowing all students whose capacity will let them read on the higher branches of applied mathematics, to have each his chance of being led to the cultivation of those parts of analysis on which rather depends its future progress than its present use in the sciences of matter."

"A large quantity of examples is indispensable."

"The following Treatise... has been endeavoured to make the theory of limits, or ultimate ratios... the sole foundation of the science, without any aid whatsoever from the theory of series, or algebraical expansions. I am not aware that any work exists in which this has been avowedly attempted, and I have been the more encouraged to make the trial from observing that the objections to the theory of limits have usually been founded either upon the difficulty of the notion itself, or its unalgebraical character, and seldom or never upon anything not to be defined or not to be received in the conception of a limit..."

"I cannot see why it is necessary that every deduction from algebra should be bound to certain conventions incident to an earlier stage of mathematical learning, even supposing them to have been consistently used up to the point in question. I should not care if any one thought this treatise unalgebraical, but should only ask whether the premises were admissible and the conclusions logical."

"I have throughout introduced the Integral Calculus in connexion with the Differential Calculus. ...Is it always proper to learn every branch of a direct subject before anything connected with the inverse relation is considered? If so why are not multiplication and involution in arithmetic made to follow addition and precede subtraction? The portion of the Integral Calculus, which properly belongs to any given portion of the Differential Calculus increases its power a hundred-fold..."

"Experience has convinced me that the proper way of teaching is to bring together that which is simple from all quarters, and, if I may use such a phrase, to draw upon the surface of the subject a proper mean between the line of closest connexion and the line of easiest deduction. This was the method followed by Euclid, who, fortunately for us, never dreamed of a geometry of triangles, as distinguished from a geometry of circles, or a separate application of the arithmetics of addition and subtraction; but made one help out the other as he best could."

"I am far from saying that this Treatise will be easy; the subject is a difficult one, as all know who have tried it."

"The absolute requisites for the study of this work... are a knowledge of algebra to the binomial at least, plane and solid geometry, plane trigonometry, and the most simple part of the usual applications of algebra to geometry. ...A. De Morgan. London July 1, 1836"

"The student of the Differential Calculus may... be brought to think it possible that the terms and ideas which that science requires may exist in his own mind in the same rude form as that of a straight line in the conceptions of a beginner in geometry. ...he must be prepared to stop his course until he can form exact notions, acquire precise ideas, both of resemblance between those things which have appeared most distinct, and of distinction between those which have appeared most alike. To do this... formal definitions would be useless; for he cannot be supposed to have one single notion in that precise form which would make it worth while to attach it to a word. One reason of the great difficulty which is found in treatises on this subject... the tacit assumption that nothing is necessary previously to actually embodying the terms and rules of the science, as if mere statement of definitions could give instantaneous power of using terms rightly. We shall here attempt... a wider degree of verbal explanation than is usual with the view of enabling the student to come to the definitions in some state of previous preparation."

"Find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give 6, or... find the square root of 6. This can be shown to be an impossible problem; for it can be shown that no fraction whatsoever multiplied by itself, can give a whole number, unless it be itself a whole number disguised in a fractional form, such as 4⁄2 or 21⁄3. To this problem, then, there is but one answer, that it is self-contradictory. But if we propose the following problem,—to find a fraction which, multiplied by itself, shall give a product lying between 6 and 6 + a; we find that this problem admits of solution in every case. It therefore admits of solution however small a may be... as small as you please. ...there is such a thing as the square root of 6, and it is denoted by √6. But we do not say we actually find this, but that we approximate to it."

"Take a unit, halve it, halve the result, and so on continually. This gives—1 1⁄2 1⁄4 1⁄8 1⁄16 1⁄32 1⁄64 1⁄128 &c.Add these together, beginning from the first, namely, add the first two, the first three, the first four, &c... We see then a continual approach to 2, which is not reached, nor ever will be, for the deficit from 2 is always equal to the last term added. ...We say that—1, 1 + 1⁄2, 1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄4, 1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄4 + 1⁄8, &c. &c.is a series of quantities which continually approximate to the limit 2. Now the truth is, these several quantities are fixed, and do not approximate to 2. ...it is we ourselves who approximate to 2, by passing from one to another. Similarly when we say, "let x be a quantity which continually approximates to the limit 2," we mean, let us assign different values to x, each nearer to 2 than the preceding, and following such a law that we shall, by continuing our steps sufficiently far, actually find a value for x which shall be as near to 2 as we please."

"The following is exactly what we mean by a LIMIT. ...let the several values of x... bea1 a2 a3 a4. . . . &c.then if by passing from a1 to a2, from a2 to a3, &c., we continually approach to a certain quantity l [lower case L, for "limit"], so that each of the set differs from l by less than its predecessors; and if, in addition to this, the approach to l is of such a kind, that name any quantity we may, however small, namely z, we shall at last come to a series beginning, say with an, and continuing ad infinitum,an an+1 an+2. . . . &c.all the terms of which severally differ from l by less than z: then l is called the limit of x with respect to the supposition in question."

"When... we have a series of values of a quantity which continually diminish, and in such a way, that name any quantity we may, however small, all the values, after a certain value, are severally less than that quantity, then the symbol by which the values are denoted is said to diminish without limit. And if the series of values increase in succession, so that name any quantity we may, however great, all after a certain point will be greater, then the series is said to increase without limit. It is also frequently said, when a quantity diminishes without limit, that it has nothing, zero or 0, for its limit: and that when it increases without limit it has infinity or ∞ or 1⁄0 for its limit."

"In every age of the world there has been an established system, which has been opposed from time to time by isolated and dissentient reformers. The established system has sometimes fallen, slowly and gradually: it has either been upset by the rising influence of some one man, or it has been sapped by gradual change of opinion in the many."

"During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical."

"A great many individuals ever since the rise of the mathematical method, have, each for himself, attacked its direct and indirect consequences. ...I shall call each of these persons a paradoxer, and his system a paradox. I use the word in the old sense: ...something which is apart from general opinion, either in subject-matter, method, or conclusion. ...Thus in the sixteenth century many spoke of the earth's motion as the paradox of Copernicus, who held the ingenuity of that theory in very high esteem, and some, I think, who even inclined towards it. In the seventeenth century, the depravation of meaning took place... Phillips says paradox is "a thing which seemeth strange"—here is the old meaning...—"and absurd, and is contrary to common opinion," which is an addition due to his own time."

"Spinoza's Philosophia Scripturæ Interpres, Exercitatio Paradoxa, printed anonymously ...is properly paradox, though also heterodox. It supposes, contrary to all opinion, orthodox and heterodox, that philosophy can... explain the Athanasian doctrine so as to be at least compatible with orthodoxy. The author would stand almost alone, if not quite; and this is what he meant."

"The manner in which a paradoxer will show himself, as to sense or nonsense, will not depend upon what he maintains, but upon whether he has or has not made a sufficient knowledge of what has been done by others, especially as to the mode of doing it, a preliminary to inventing knowledge for himself."

"Aspiring to lead others, they have never given themselves the fair chance of being first led by other others into something better than they can start for themselves; and that they should first do this is what both those classes of others have a fair right to expect. New knowledge... must come by contemplation of old knowledge... mechanical contrivance sometimes, not very often, escapes this rule."

"All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors, and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception. I do not say that every man has made direct acquantance with the whole of his mental ancestry... But... it is remarkable how many of the greatest names in all departments of knowledge have been real antiquaries in their several subjects. I may cite among those... in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke."

"I will not, from henceforward, talk to any squarer of the circle, trisector of the angle, duplicator of the cube, constructor of perpetual motion, subverter of gravitation, stagnator of the earth, builder of the universe, etc."

"Modern discoveries have not been made by large collections of facts, with subsequent discussion, separation, and resulting deduction of a truth thus rendered perceptible. A few facts have suggested an hypothesis, which means a supposition, proper to explain them. The necessary results of this supposition are worked out, and then, and not till then, other facts are examined to see if their ulterior results are found in nature."

"‘European science could never have reached its present height had it not been fertilised by successive wafts from the […] knowledge stored up in the East.’ ‘Think what must have been the effect of the intense Hinduizing of three such men as Babbage, De Morgan and George Boole on the mathematical atmosphere of 1830–1865.’ ‘I do as George Boole and De Morgan did: I bow my head inreverent thankfulness to that mysterious East, whence come to us wafts of some transcendent power the nature of which we ourselves can hardly state in words.’"

"A very interesting detailed account of the peculiarities of the circle squarer, and of the futility of the attempts on the part of the Mathematicians to convince him of his errors, will be found in Augustus De Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes."

"The fact is known that having very thoroughly worked at the generalisations of Mathematics in theory and practice, Mr. De Morgan was enabled to establish with perfect precision the most highly generalised conception of Logic, perhaps, which it is possible to entertain. It is no new doctrine that Logic deals with the necessary laws of action of thought, and that Mathematics apply these laws to necessary matter of thought; but by showing that these laws can and must be applied with equal precision and equal necessity to all kinds of relations, and not only to those which the Aristotelian theory takes account of, he so enlarged the scope and intensified the power of Logic as an instrument, that we may hope for coming generations, as he must have hoped... another instalment of the kind... Mathematics are, meanwhile, and perhaps will always remain, the completest and most accurate example of the generalised Logic. At any rate, in the mind of the author, Logic and Mathematics as 'the two great branches of exact science, the study of the necessary laws of thought, the study of the necessary matter of thought, were always viewed in connection and antithesis."

"Dr. George Boole, author of The Laws of Thought had introduced himself in the year 1842 to Mr. De Morgan by a letter on the Differential and Integral Calculus then recently published. His character and pursuits were in many points like those of the author who found great pleasure in his correspondence and friendship. ...In 1847, his attention having been drawn to the subject by the publication of Mr. De Morgan's Formal Logic, he published the Mathematical Analysis of Logic and in the following year communicated... a paper on the Calculus of Logic. His great work, An Investigation into the Laws of Thought... was a development of the principle laid down in the Calculus..."

"Retirement should be a happier time, conditioned upon not being ill.#"

"People are treated for mental disorders, they go back to work and they earn wages again. We can see how their earnings go up. But how do they feel about themselves and the world? That has a value."

"We usually think that a strong economy leads to an increase in life satisfaction among the population. We found that's not the case in Scotland."

"With respect to the present expedition, it is defensible on the ground that the enormous power of France enables her to coerce the weaker state to become the enemy of England...the law of nature is stronger than even the law of nations. It is to the law of self-preservation that England appeals for justification of her proceedings. It is admitted...that if Denmark had evidenced any hostility towards this country, then we should have been justified in measures of retaliation. How then is the case altered, when we find Denmark acting under the coercion of a power notoriously hostile to us? Knowing, as we do, that Denmark is under the influence of France, can there be the shadow of a doubt that the object of our enemy would have been accomplished? Denmark coerced into hostility stands in the same position as Denmark voluntarily hostile, when the law of self-preservation comes into play...England, according to that law of self-preservation which is a fundamental principle of the law of nations, is justified in securing, and therefore enforcing, from Denmark a neutrality which France would by compulsion have converted into an active hostility."

"Our military force at this moment is as efficient in discipline as it is in numbers; and this not only in the regular army, but in the militia, volunteers, and other descriptions of force. We have six hundred thousand men in arms, besides a navy of two hundred thousand. The masculine energies of the nation were never more conspicuous, and the country never at any period of its history stood in so proud and glorious a position, as at present. After a conflict for fifteen years, against an enemy whose power had been progressively increasing, we are still able to maintain the war with augmenting force and a population, by the pressure of external circumstances, consolidated into an impregnable military mass. Our physical strength has risen when it has been called for; and if we do not present the opposition of numerous fortresses to an invader as the continent does, we present the more insuperable barrier of a high-spirited, patriotic, and enthusiastic people."

"Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the state; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth."

"If our armies are not so numerous as those of other nations, they have qualities which render them more valuable. Those raised by voluntary enlistment are more effective than those raised by conscription; and I should think a general would feel much more confidence in an army raised as our armies are raised, than he could possibly have while leading to battle a band of slaves torn from their homes by force."

"I will venture to lay it down as a general principle, that there are no better means for securing the continuance of peace, than to have it known that the possessions in the neighbourhood of a foreign state are in a condition to repel attack. I am firmly persuaded that among nations, weakness will never be a foundation for security."

"I am far from wishing to treat lightly or inconsiderately the evils attendant upon a standing army. The history of those countries where standing armies have been allowed to usurp an ascendancy over the civil authorities, is a volume pregnant with instruction to every one. We may look at France, for instance, and derive a lesson of eternal importance. But when it is said, that in ancient Rome twelve thousand praetorian bands were potent enough to dispose of that empire according to their will and pleasure, it should be remembered that that was the result of a number of pre-disposing causes, which have no existence in England. Before the civil constitution of any country can be overturned by a standing army, the people of that country must be lamentably degenerate; they must be debased and enervated by all the worst excesses of an arbitrary and despotic government; their martial spirit must be extinguished; they must be brought to a state of political degradation, I may almost say of political emasculation, such as few countries experience that have once known the blessings of liberty."

"It has been said that that which has made England a great and an energetic nation, is the principle heretofore acted upon of maintaining a very low Peace establishment, while the Peace establishments of the continent have been uniformly high. I do not agree in that view of the subject. For my own part, I believe much of our financial embarrassment to have been caused by our former low Peace establishments, and to this circumstance the failure of many of our military operations may be traced."

"The honourable gentleman has alluded to the distresses and financial embarrassments of the country. I should be the last man to speak of those distresses in a slighting manner; but in considering the amount of our burdens, we ought not to forget under what circumstances those difficulties have been incurred. Engaged in an arduous struggle, single-handed and unaided, not only against all the powers of Europe, but with the confederated forces of the civilized world, our object was not merely military glory—not the temptation of territorial acquisition—not even what might be considered a more justifiable object, the assertion of violated rights and the vindication of national honour; but we were contending for our very existence as an independent nation. When the political horizon was thus clouded, when no human foresight could point out from what quarter relief was to be expected, when the utmost effort of national energy was not to despair, I would put to the honourable gentleman whether, if at that period it could have been shown that Europe might be delivered from its thraldom, but that this contingent must be purchased at the price of a long and patient endurance of our domestic burdens, we should not have accepted the conditions with gratitude? I lament as deeply as the honourable gentleman the burdens of the country; but it should be recollected that they were the price which we had agreed to pay for our freedom and independence."

"I reverence, as much as any one can do, the memory of those great men who effected the Revolution of 1688, and who rescued themselves and us from the thraldom of religious intolerance, and the tyranny of arbitrary power; but I think we are not rendering an appropriate homage to them, when we practice that very intolerance which they successfully resisted, and when we withhold from our fellow-subjects the blessings of that Constitution, which they established with so much courage and wisdom. ... that great religious radical, King William...intended to raise a goodly fabric of charity, of concord, and of peace, and upon which his admirers of the present day are endeavouring to build the dungeon of their Protestant Constitution. If the views and intentions of King William had been such as are now imputed to him, instead of blessing his arrival as an epoch of glory and happiness to England, we should have had reason to curse the hour when first he printed his footstep on our strand. But he came not here a bigoted polemic, with religious tracts in one hand, and civil persecution in the other; he came to regenerate and avenge the prostrate and insulted liberties of England; he came with peace and toleration on his lips, and with civil and religious liberty in his heart."

"If I wished to convince an impartial Englishman of the policy of abolishing these [anti-Catholic] laws, I should bid him repair to the south of Ireland; to mix with the Catholic gentry; to converse with the Catholic peasantry...to see what a fierce and unsocial spirit bad laws engender, and how impossible it is to degrade a people, without at the same time demoralizing them too. But if this should fail to convince him...I should then tell him to go among the Protestants of the north. There he would see how noble and generous natures may be corrupted by the possession of undue and inordinate ascendancy; there he would see men, naturally kind and benevolent, brought up from their earliest infancy to hate the great majority of their countrymen, with all the bitterness which neighbourhood and consanguinity infuse into quarrels; and not satisfied with the disputes of the days in which they live, raking up the ashes of the dead for food to their angry passions; summoning the shades of departed centuries, to give a keener venom to the contests of the present age."

"It is impossible for any man, of late, to have set foot beyond the shores of these islands, without observing with deep mortification a great and sudden change in the manner in which England is spoken of abroad; without finding, that instead of being looked up to as the patron, no less than the model, of constitutional freedom, as the refuge from persecution, and the shield against oppression, her name is coupled by every tongue on the continent with everything that is hostile to improvement, and friendly to despotism, from the banks of the Tagus to the shores of the Bosphorus...time was, and that but lately, when England was regarded by Europe as the friend of liberty and civilization, and therefore of happiness and prosperity, in every land; because it was thought that her rulers had the wisdom to discover, that the selfish interests and political influence of England were best promoted by the extension of liberty and civilization. Now, on the contrary, the prevailing opinion is, that England thinks her advantage to lie in withholding from other countries that constitutional liberty which she herself enjoys."

"When Bonaparte was to be dethroned, the Sovereigns of Europe called up their people to their aid; they invoked them in the sacred names of Freedom and National Independence; the cry went forth throughout Europe: and those, whom Subsidies had no power to buy, and Conscriptions no force to compel, roused by the magic sound of Constitutional Rights, started spontaneously into arms. The long-suffering Nations of Europe rose up as one man, and by an effort tremendous and wide spreading, like a great convulsion of nature, they hurled the conqueror from his throne. But promises made in days of distress, were forgotten in the hour of triumph...The rulers of mankind...had set free a gigantic spirit from its iron prison, but when that spirit had done their bidding, they shrunk back with alarm, from the vastness of that power, which they themselves had set into action, and modestly requested, it would go down again into its former dungeon. Hence, that gloomy discontent, that restless disquiet, that murmuring sullenness, which pervaded Europe after the overthrow of Bonaparte; and which were so unlike that joyful gladness, which might have been looked for, among men, who had just been released from the galling yoke of a foreign and a military tyrant. In 1820 the long brooding fire burst out into open flame; in Germany it was still kept down and smothered, but in Italy, in Spain, and in Portugal, it overpowered every resistance."

"We shall drink the cause of Liberalism all over the world. The reign of Metternich is over and the days of the Duke's policy might be measured by algebra, if not by arithmetic."

"[The French government's] assurances of friendship and peace are indeed incessant and uniform, but they continue actively preparing for war when nobody threatens them, and while every day discloses more and more their designs upon Belgium, and the underhand proceedings which they are carrying on with reference to that country. They every day betray an unceasing disposition to pick a quarrel, and to treat us in a manner to which we can never submit. Pray take care, in all your conversation with Sebastiani, to make him understand that our desire for peace will never lead us to submit to affront either in language or in act."

"Proneness to changes and fondness for experiment have never been the character of the English nation. They have, on the contrary, been remarkable for tenacious adherence to existing institutions, and for stubborn resistance even to plausible innovations. Striking, indeed, is the contrast which, in this respect, they exhibit with their next door neighbours of the continent; for while France boasts of the newness and freshness of her institutions, the people of England place their pride and attachment in the antiquity of theirs. So hard, indeed, is it to bring this nation to consent to great and important changes, that some of those measures which impartial posterity will stamp with the mint-mark of purest wisdom, and most unalloyed good, have only been wrung from the reluctant consent of England, after long and toilsome years of protracted discussion; and even such acts as the re-admission of the Catholics of the pale of the constitution, and the prohibition of the traffic in the flesh and blood of man, were each of them the achievement of a hard-fought contest of many years."

"The landed interest is the great foundation upon which rest the fabric of society, and the institutions of the country. I mean no disparagement to manufactures and commerce; I know how essential they are to the happiness and prosperity of the country, and how much they add even to the value of the land. But the land of the country is the country itself, and the owner of the land has the deepest and most permanent interest in its well-being; tied down to the soil, he must share the fortunes of his country, whether in its greatness or its fall."

"I never can admit that it can be wise to give way to the unjust pretensions of France for the purpose of gaining for the French government...the support of the violent party, or even of the moderate encroachers. Depend upon it, no good is gained by such concessions; you only whet the appetite instead of satisfying it. We should betray our own weakness and encourage fresh demands."

"Governments are not at liberty to act solely from motives of generous sympathy for the sufferings of an oppressed people, they are bound by the severer rules of general principles, to respect rights which are inherent in other nations."

"I see those pretended politicians who place all their subtlety, and who think they serve their country best, in circumventing those with whom they treat, interpreting the conditions of a treaty in such a manner, that all the advantage results to their own country. Far from blushing at conduct so contrary to equity, to right, and to national honesty, they boast of their dexterity, and pretend that they deserve the name of great negociators. How long shall public men boast of conduct which would disgrace a private individual? ...Shall powerful states abandon openly that which is honest, for that which may appear useful? It often happens for the happiness of the human race, that this pretended utility is fatal to the powers who follow it, and that, even among sovereigns, candour and right are found to be the safest policy."

"Constitutional States I consider to be the natural Allies of this country and whoever may be in office conducting the affairs of Great Britain, I am persuaded that no English Ministry will perform its duty if it be inattentive to the interests of such States."

"I will not talk of non-intervention, for it is not an English word."

"The interests of civilization, the interests of commerce, and the interests of political independence, were all the interests of England, and all had been signally promoted by the emancipation of Greece."

"Any insult offered to His Majesty's flag, however small the vessel which bears it, would be resented and avenged by all the means which Great Britain can command, [and] any hindrance opposed to the execution of these orders will be considered as an act of hostility."

"I cannot help regretting that honourable gentlemen on the other side of this House should, in all the views which they announce on questions of foreign policy, seem always, by some fatality, to sympathize with arbitrary and despotic government. I cannot help regretting that they should view with averted and disdainful eye the efforts of every country which is endeavouring to establish freedom, and that they should condemn those so pointedly, who, by good offices or friendly co-operation, engage in the attempt to assist such nations in forming free establishments"

"Now the English nation is able to make war, but it will only do so where its own interests are concerned. We are a simple and practical nation, a commercial nation; we do not go in for chivalrous enterprises or fight for others as the French do."

"In the outset, I must deny the charge made personally against myself, and against the Government to which I belong, of an identification with the interests of other nations...I am satisfied that the interest of England is the Polar star—the guiding principle of the conduct of the Government; and I defy any man to show, by any act of mine, that any other principle has directed my conduct, or that I have had any other object in view than the interests of the country to which I belong."

"[T]he object they [the Five Powers] have in view is to maintain the integrity of the Turkish Empire; and they have a right to maintain that integrity, because its maintenance is necessary for upholding the balance of power in Europe, and is essential to the preservation of peace in the world."

"Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, or by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity. Thus, people compare an ancient monarchy with an old building, an old tree, or an old man, and because the building, tree, or man must, from the nature of things, crumble, or decay, or die, they imagine that the same thing holds good with a community, and that the same laws which govern inanimate matter, or vegetable or animal life, govern also nations and states."

"It is indeed remarkable how contradictory are the assertions which the partizans of Mehemet Ali are driven to have recourse to; for while at one time and for one purpose they represent him as the great champion of Mahommedan feeling, at another time, and for another purpose, they extol him as the subduer of Mahommedan prejudice, and as a man who has had energy enough to coerce that religious fanaticism which rendered the Mahommedans so overbearing and intolerable to the Christians in all the transactions and intercourse of life."

"I regret to learn that you are still not easy about your own affairs, but trust all will be speedily adjusted. You always allow me, dear Uncle, to speak frankly to you; you will, therefore, I hope, not be displeased if I venture to make a few observations on one or two parts of your letter. You say that the anger of the Belgians is principally directed against England. Now, I must that you are very unjust towards us, and (if I could) I might say even a little angry with you, dear Uncle. We only pressed Belgium for her own good, and not for ours. It may seem hard at first, but the time will come when you will see that we were right in urging you not to delay any longer the signature of the treaty."

"Your Lordship cannot too strongly impress upon the Portuguese Government that the conclusion of a Slave Trade Treaty is a matter which now concerns Portugal only but that the British Claims are a matter upon which Her Majesty's Government cannot admit any further delay. I have to remark to Your Lordship that as yet the new Portuguese Ministry differs from the preceding one in words only; that Her Majesty's Government expects deeds; and that evasion and delay cannot be accepted."

"The rivalship of European manufacturers is fast excluding our productions from the market of Europe, and we must unremittingly endeavour to find in other parts of the world new vents for the products of our industry. The world is large enough and the wants of the human race ample enough to afford a demand for all we can manufacture: but it is the business of government to open and secure the roads for the merchant."

"You have obtained the Cession of Hong Kong, a barren Island with hardly a House upon it... it seems obvious that Hong Kong will not be the Mart of Trade... it is impossible that you should continue to hold your appointment in China."

"They sally forth unawares on the villagers of the country; they put to death every man who cannot escape by flight; and they carry off into captivity the women and children. ("Shame, shame.") They carry away every head of cattle, every sheep, and every horse, and they burn what they cannot carry off—the crop on the ground and the corn in the granaries are consumed by the fire of the invaders. ("Shame.") What is the consequence? While in India our officers ride about unarmed and alone, amidst the wildest tribes of the wilderness, there is not a Frenchman in Africa who shows his face above a given spot from the sentry at his post, who does not fall a victim to the wild and justifiable retaliation of the Arab. (Hear, hear.) They professed to colonize Algeria, but they are only encamped in military posts; and while we in India have the feelings of the people with us, in Africa every native is opposed to the French, and every heart burns with the desire of vengeance. (Hear, hear.) I mention these things because it is right you should know them; they are an additional proof that even in this world Providence has decreed that injustice and violence shall meet with their appropriate punishment, and that justice and mercy shall also have their reward. (Cheers.)"

"He alluded to that grievance which was expressed by the demand for fixity of tenure. He held that it would be unjust for Parliament to interfere in the arrangements between the landlord and tenant. To do so, would be to establish a principle of confiscation—to interfere with the rights of property, the foundation of all human society—property which the poorest man by his own industry and exertions, might acquire, as well as the wealthy and powerful."

"Sir, a wise Government in its home policy considers the reasonable wants of the people; in its foreign policy, it is prepared to resist the unjust demands and the unreasonable views of foreign powers. The present Government inverts this method; it is all resistance at home, all concession abroad."

"[I]f this opium had been seized in the ordinary course of Chinese authority, as being a contraband article, brought into China against the law—if it had been seized by the Chinese authorities within Chinese jurisdiction, there would have been no claim on the finance or upon the power of this Government to demand compensation or redress from the Government of China. It was entirely owing to the manner in which the opium had been extorted, that the late Government had felt that an outrage upon British subjects had been committed, which not only authorised but rendered necessary measures of hostility, should such be required. It had been said that what the late Government demanded was satisfaction for the injured honour of the country, and that one of the ways in which satisfaction was to be given was payment for the opium so extorted."

"In addition to the demand for compensation to the holders of opium, the Government added another for payment of the debts of the insolvent Hong merchants, and also a third for the pay uncut of the expenses of the war. The last demand was certainly unusual in European warfare, but it was not unusual in Asiatic warfare; and under all circumstances, in order to make the Chinese sensible of the extent of the outrage they had committed, and that they might sufficiently feel the exercise of the power of Britain in vindication of their honour, it was thought expedient and proper to make them pay the expense of the war, in addition to compensating the injured parties."

"I will venture to say, that if all the other crimes which the human race has committed, from the creation down to the present day, were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal, I am sure they could not exceed, the amount of guilt which has been incurred by mankind, in connexion with this diabolical Slave Trade. And is it not, then, the duty of every government, and of every nation on whom Providence has bestowed the means of putting an end to this crime, to employ those means to the greatest possible extent? And if there is any government and any nation upon whom that duty is more especially incumbent, is not that government the government of England, and are we not that nation? Political influence and naval power are the two great instruments by which the Slave Trade may be abolished; our political influence, if properly exerted, is great, our naval power is pre-eminent."

"Ministers, in fact, appear to shape their policy not with reference to the great interests of their own country, but from a consideration of the effect which their course may produce upon the position of Foreign Governments. It may very well be a desirable object, and one worthy of consideration, that a particular individual should continue in the administration of affairs in another country, but it is too much that from regard to that object, the interests of this country should be sacrificed, and that every demand of Foreign Powers should be acceded to...It seems to me that the system of purchasing temporary security by lasting sacrifices, and of placing the interests of Foreign Ministries above those of this country, is one that never can be worked out with advantage either to the honour of this country, or to that of the Administration which pursues such a course. Since the accession to office of the right hon. Gentleman opposite, no one can have failed to observe, that there has been a great diminution of British influence and consideration in every foreign country. Influence abroad is to be maintained only by the operation of one or other of two principles—hope and fear. We ought to teach the weaker Powers to hope that they will receive the support of this country in their time of danger. Powerful countries should be taught to fear that they will be resisted by England in any unjust acts either towards ourselves or towards those who are bound in ties of amity with us."

"[I]f anything were calculated to render permanent and secure our friendly relations with great neighbouring Powers, it was the placing ourselves in a position of security against any sudden or unforeseen attack. There was no complete security for friendly relations between different countries, except in a state of mutual defence."

"[I]f we arrived at that situation [when]...the one country was fully prepared for aggression, and the other wholly unprepared for events, the result must be either some very dreadful disaster or some deep humiliation to be sustained by the country so undefended."

"[I]f they were negotiating with a foreign country on a matter which might threaten war, it was so far from embarrassing the negotiation, that it would strengthen it, to place ourselves in a position to repel any sudden and unforeseen attack."

"Louis Philippe and Guizot have carried their point by boldness. Louis Philippe and Guizot, like practical and sagacious men, determined to knock us down at once, and make an apology afterwards if necessary to pacify us."

"Mr. Harney...says the object and result of my foreign policy has been to establish tyranny and despotism. There really is something amusing in the novelty; for, after I have been accused all over Europe of being the great instigator of revolution—(Laughter)—the friend and champion of all popular insurrections, the enemy of all constituted authorities—after I have been charged with disturbing the peace of Europe by giving encouragement to every revolutionary and anarchical set of men—(renewed laughter)—it is somewhat amusing to hear charges the very reverse made against me by my present opponent."

"I cannot make out in what respect our conduct with regard to China is to bear out the charge of contempt for liberty and love of despotism which Mr. Harney has imputed to us. He says that we tried to compel the Chinese to smoke opium. Why, that charge is much the same as if a man were to be accused of compelling the people of England to drink beer or spirits or wine, or anything else of which they are exceedingly fond."

"[T]hese Chinese authorities suddenly turned round upon the men who had been their partners in this smuggling trade, and...they took thirty or forty British merchants, along with the British Consul, and shut them up, and plainly told them they should be starved unless they delivered up their stocks of opium... Now, I should like to know what Cromwell would have said if twenty or thirty British subjects and an officer of the Commonwealth had been shut up in limbo, and told they were to be starved... I know what he would have done. He would have stood no nonsense. (Laughter.) This was what we did. We said "This won't do; this is no go, gentlemen of China. (A laugh.) You have extorted valuable property from British subjects by a threat of locking them up till they die of starvation. We call upon you to refund the value of what you have so improperly and illegally wrested from our subjects." They refused; force was employed; and we brought them to our terms. In this instance at least, our policy was not attended with any expense. We said to the Chinese, "You have behaved very ill; we have had to teach you better manners; it has cost us something to do it, but we will send our bill in, and you must pay our charges." That was done, and they have certainly profited by the lesson. ("Hear," and a laugh.) They have become free traders too. (Hear, hear.)"

"H.M.'s Govt. are deeply impressed with the conviction that it is wise for Sovereigns and their Governments to pursue in the administration of their affairs a system of progressive improvement; to apply remedies to such evils as upon examination they may find to exist; and to re-model from time to time the ancient Institutions of their Country, so as to render them more suitable to the gradual growth of Intelligence, and to the increasing diffusion of political Knowledge, and H.M. Gr. consider it to be an undeniable truth that if an independent Sovereign in the service of his deliberate judgement shall think fit to make within his Dominions such Improvements in the Laws and Institution of his country as he may think conducive to the welfare of his People, no other Govt. can have any right to attempt to restrain or to interfere with such an employment of one of the inherent attributes of independent Sovereignty."

"I hold with respect to alliances, that England is a Power sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful, to steer her own course, and not to tie herself as an unnecessary appendage to the policy of any other Government. I hold that the real policy of England—apart from questions which involve her own particular interests, political or commercial—is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done...I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. ... And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English Minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy."

"Prince Metternich thinks he is a conservative, in clinging obstinately to the status quo in Europe; we think ourselves conservative in preaching and advising everywhere concessions, reforms and improvements, where public opinion demands them; you on the contrary refuse them."

"What business is it of ours to ask whether the French nation thinks proper to be governed by a king, an emperor, a president, or a consul? Our object and our duty is to cement the closest ties of friendship between ourselves and our nearest neighbour... There is nothing, I am convinced, in the real interests of England and France which can stand in the way of the most cordial friendship between the two nations."

"I therefore fearlessly challenge the verdict which this House, as representing a political, a commercial, a constitutional country, is to give on the question now brought before it; whether the principles on which the foreign policy of Her Majesty's government has been conducted, and the sense of duty which has led us to think ourselves bound to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad, are proper and fitting guides for those who are charged with the government of England; and whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong."

"It is only from England, and from the exertions of England, that any hope can be entertained of the extinction of the slave trade, and of the ultimate abolition of slavery throughout the world; because it is England alone that feels any deep and sincere interest in the matter. England now holds a proud position among the nations of the earth, and exercises a great influence upon the destinies of mankind. That influence is owing, in the first place, to our great wealth, to our unbounded resources, to our military and naval strength. But it is owing still more, if possible, to the moral dignity which marks the character and conduct of the British people...Those who desire to see the principles of liberty thrive and extend through the world, should cherish, with an almost religious veneration, the prosperity and greatness of England. So long as England shall ride preeminent on the ocean of human affairs, there can be none whose fortunes shall be so shipwrecked—there can be none whose condition shall be so desperate and forlorn—that they may not cast a look of hope towards the light that beams from hence; and though they may be beyond the reach of our power, our moral support and our sympathy shall cheer them in their adversity, and shall assist them to bear up, and to hold out, waiting for a better day."

"The Beer Shops licensed to have the Beer drunk on the Premises, are a Pest to the Community. They are Haunts of Thieves and Schools for Prostitutes. They demoralize the lower Classes. I wish you would turn your mind to consider Whether this Evil could not be abated. That Beer should be sold like anything Else, to be taken away by the Purchaser to be consumed at Home is most reasonable and the more People are enabled so to supply the labouring Classes the better, but the words “licensed to be drunk on the Premises” are by the common People interpreted as applicable to the Customers as well as to the Liquor, and well do they avail themselves of the License."

"The hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright) asks, "What is our interest in this war?" and he also asked me to explain the meaning of the expression "the balance of power." ...[The] "Balance of power" means only this—that a number of weaker States may unite to prevent a stronger one from acquiring a power which should be dangerous to them, and which should overthrow their independence, their liberty, and their freedom of action. It is the doctrine of self-preservation. It is the doctrine of self-defence, with the simple qualification that it is combined with sagacity and with forethought, and an endeavour to prevent imminent danger before it comes thundering at your doors."

"...he thinks that peace is, of all things, the best, and that war is, of all things, the worst. Now, Sir, I happen to be of opinion that there are things for which peace may be advantageously sacrificed, and that there are calamities which a nation may endure which are far worse than war. This has been the opinion of men in all ages whose conduct has been admired by their contemporaries, and has obtained for them the approbation of posterity. The hon. Member, however, reduces everything to the question of pounds, shillings, and pence, and I verily believe that if this country were threatened with an immediate invasion likely to end in its conquest, the hon. Member would sit down, take a piece of paper, and would put on one side of the account the contributions which his Government would require from him for the defence of the liberty and independence of the country, and he would put on the other the probable contributions which the general of the invading army might levy upon Manchester, and if he found that, on balancing the account, it would be cheaper to be conquered than to be laid under contribution for defence, he would give his vote against going to war for the liberties and independence of the country, rather than bear his share in the expenditure which it would entail."

"Talk to me of the aristocracy of England! Why, look to that glorious charge of the cavalry at Balaklava—look to that charge, where the noblest and the wealthiest of the land rode foremost, followed by heroic men from the lowest classes of the community, each rivalling the other in bravery, neither the peer who led nor the trooper who followed being distinguished the one from the other. In that glorious band there were the sons of the gentry of England; leading were the noblest of the land, and following were the representatives of the people of this country."

"I noticed, I must confess, with great pain the tenor and tone of the speech of the hon. Member for the West Riding, because there pervaded the whole of it an anti-English feeling, an abnegation of all those ties which bind men to their country and to their fellow-countrymen, which I should hardly have expected from the lips of any Member of this House. Everything that was English was wrong, and everything that was hostile to England was right."

"Sir, I believe that if the House adopts this Motion...[t]hey will say, "Here is a Power that has been formerly great in arms, whose armies have gained victories in remote regions, whose fleets have floated triumphantly over every ocean... this people are now overcome by the love of gain. They fear the expenses and the efforts which may be necessary to protect their countrymen, and they abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians—a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." I say foreign nations would feel that England has descended from that high station which hitherto she has occupied, at the beck of some of the basest, the meanest, and the most degraded beings in the civilized world."

"If those who voted against us had risen to power, what ought they have to have done as the logical and inevitable consequences of their vote? They asserted that our proceedings were unjustifiable. They were bound, therefore, in the event of their success, to have apologised to the Chinese barbarians for the wrongs we had done...they must have paid the rewards which had been given for the heads of our merchants, and the cost of the arsenic which had been used in poisoning our fellow-subjects at Hongkong. Gentlemen, I cannot envy the feelings of those men who could witness with calmness the heads of respectable British merchants on the walls of Canton, or the murders and assassinations and poisonings perpetrated on our fellow-countrymen abroad, and who, instead of feeling their blood boil with indignation at such proceedings, would have had us make an abject submission to the barbarians by whom these atrocities were committed."

"An insolent barbarian wielding authority at Canton had violated the British flag, broken the engagements of treaties, offered rewards for the heads of British subjects in that part of China, and planned their destruction by murder, assassination, and poisons."

"Young Ireland, the Catholic Party and its newspaper organs in Dublin are trying to do all the mischief they can. They are praising the mutineers, and calling upon the Irish to follow their example. I think it will be advisable to call out and embody five thousand more Militia, making twenty thousand in all, and it would be best to bring over to England all the Irish regiments belonging to the Catholic counties, and to send English regiments to Ireland. Some of the Northern Irish regiments would be well left in Ireland. They are chiefly Protestants, and would be delighted to put down the Croppys if they should rise."

"Carlisle is right in saying that there is no serious danger to be apprehended from Ireland, but what I want to prevent is any, even the slightest, outbreak, and this is only to be done by showing that we have in Ireland a sufficient Saxon force to make any movement on the part of the Celts perfectly hopeless, and sure to bring immediate destruction on those who take part in it. Any outbreak of any kind in Ireland would be magnified by our enemies and rivals, and would greatly weaken our political position in Europe."

"To punish the guilty adequately exceeds the power of any civilised man; for the atrocities which have been committed are such as to be imagined and perpetrated only by demons sallying forth from the lowest depths of hell. But punishment must be inflicted, not only in a spirit of vengeance, but in a spirit of security, in order that the example of punished crime may deter from a repetition of the offence, and in order to insure the safety of our countrymen and countrywomen in India for the future. He will have to spare the innocent, and it is most gratifying that while the guilty may be counted by thousands the innocent must be reckoned by millions."

"These Yankees are the most disagreeable Fellows to have to do with about any American question; they are on the Spot, strong, deeply interested in the matter, totally unscrupulous and dishonest and determined somehow or other to carry their Point; we are far away, weak from Distance, controlled by the Indifference of the nation as to the Question discussed, and by its strong commercial Interest in maintaining Peace with the United States... I have long felt inwardly convinced that the Anglo-Saxon race will in process of time become masters of the whole American Continent North and South... it is not for us to assist such a Consummation, but on the contrary we ought to delay it as long as possible."

"My dear John Russell, Till lately I had strong confidence in the fair intentions of Napoleon towards England, but of late I have begun to feel great distrust and to suspect that his formerly declared intention of avenging Waterloo has only lain dormant and has not died away. He seems to have thought that he ought to lay his foundation by beating with our aid or with our concurrence, or our neutrality first Russia and then Austria: and by dealing with them generously to make them his friends and in any subsequent quarrel with us."

"Our interests require that Egypt should remain what it is, an integral part of the Turkish empire. We do not want it or wish it for ourselves, any more than any rational man with an estate in the North of England and a residence in the South would have wished to possess the inns on the North Road."

"It is quite clear that if by sudden attack by an Enemy landed in strength our Dock-yards were to be destroyed our Maritime Power would for more than half a century be paralysed, and our Colonies, our commerce, and the Subsistence of a large Part of our Population would be at the Mercy of our Enemy, who would be sure to shew us no Mercy—we should be reduced to the Rank of a third Rate Power if no worse happened to us. That such a Landing is in the present State of Things possible must be manifest. No Naval Force of ours can effectually prevent it. ... One night is enough for the Passage to our Coast, and Twenty Thousand men might be landed at any Point before our Fleet knew that the Enemy was out of Harbour. There could be no security against the simultaneous Landing of 20,000 for Portsmouth 20,000 for Plymouth and 20,000 for Ireland our Troops would necessarily be scattered about the United Kingdom, and with Portsmouth and Plymouth as they now are those Two dock yards and all they contain would be entered and burnt before Twenty Thousand Men could be brought together to defend either of them. ... if these defensive works are necessary, it is manifest that they ought to be made with the least possible delay; to spread their Completion over 20 or 30 years would be Folly unless we could come to an agreement with a chivalrous Antagonist, not to molest us till we could inform him we were quite ready to repel his attack—we are told that these works might, if money were forthcoming be finished possibly in three at latest in four years. Long enough this to be kept in a State of imperfect Defence."

"I must make a protest against the sort of exaggerations in which the noble Lord has indulged. He has described the railway launching 2,000 or 3,000 ruffians upon some quiet neighbourhood in a manner that might lead one to imagine the train conveyed a set of banditti to plunder, rack, and ravage the country, murder the people, burn the houses, and commit every sort of atrocity...they may conceive it to be a very harmless pursuit...Some people look upon it as an exhibition of manly courage, characteristic of the people of this country. I saw the other day a long extract from a French newspaper describing this fight as a type of the national character for endurance, patience under suffering of indomitable perseverance, in determined effort, and holding it up as a specimen of the manly and admirable qualities of the British race...I do not perceive why any number of persons, say 1,000 if you please, who assemble to witness a prize fight, are in their own persons more guilty of a breach of the peace than an equal number of persons who assemble to witness a balloon ascent. There they stand; there is no breach of the peace; they go to see a sight, and when that sight is over they return, and no injury is done to any one. They only stand or sit on the grass to witness the performance, and as to the danger to those who perform themselves, I imagine the danger to life in the case of those who go up in balloons is certainly greater than that of two combatants who merely hit each other as hard as they can, but inflict no permanent injury upon each other."

"To fortify London by works is impossible—London must be defended by an army in the Field, and by one or more Battles,—one I trust would be sufficient; but for this Purpose we must be able to concentrate in the Field the largest possible Military Force. In order to do so we must have the means of defending our Naval arsenals with the smallest possible Military Force, and this can be accomplished only by Fortifications which enable a small Force to resist a larger one. Thence it is demonstrable that to fortify our Dockyards is to assist the Defence of London. As to Time we have no time to lose. I deeply regret that various circumstances have so long delayed proposing the Measure to Parliament, but it would be a Breach of our public Duty to put it off to another year. There may be some Persons in the House of Commons with peculiar notions on things in General and with very imperfect notions as to our National Interest who will object to the proposed Measures, but I cannot bring myself to believe that the Majority of the present House of Commons, or the House of Commons that would be elected on an appeal on this Question to the People of the Country would refuse to sanction Measures so indispensably necessary."

"I am heartily glad that Elgin and Grant determined to burn down the Summer Palace and that "the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood"… It was absolutely necessary to stamp by some such permanent record our indignation at the treachery and brutality of these Tartars, for Chinese they are not."

"I have watched the French Emperor narrowly, and have studied his character and conduct. You may rely upon it that, at the bottom of his heart, there rankles a deep and inextinguishable desire to humble and punish England, and to avenge, if he can, the many humiliations — political, naval and military — which, since the beginning of this century, England has by herself and her allies inflicted upon France. He has sufficiently organised his military means; he is now stealthily but steadily organising his naval means; and when all is ready, the overture will be played, the curtain will draw up, and we shall have a very disagreeable melodrama."

"It is in the highest degree likely that the North will not be able to subdue the south, and it is no doubt certain that if the Southern union is established as an independent state it would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures but the operations of the war have as yet been too indecisive to warrant an acknowledgement of the southern union."

"Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten."

"It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the rabid hatred of England which animates the exiled Irishmen who direct almost all the Northern newspapers, will so excite the masses as to make it impossible for Lincoln and Seward to grant our demands; and we must therefore look forward to war as the probable result."

"It would be very delightful if your Utopia could be realized and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce, and would give up quarrelling and fighting altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal; and that this is human nature is proved by the fact that republics, where the masses govern are far more quarrelsome, and more addicted to fighting, than monarchies, which are governed by comparatively few persons."

"There is no doubt that all nations are aggressive; it is the nature of man. There start up from time to time between countries antagonistic passions and questions of conflicting interest, which, if not properly dealt with, would terminate in the explosion of war. Now, if one country is led to think that another country, with which such questions might arise, is from fear disposed on every occasion tamely to submit to any amount of indignity, that is an encouragement to hostile conduct and to extreme proceedings which lead to conflict. It may be depended on that there is no better security for peace between nations than the conviction that each must respect the other, that each is capable of defending itself, and that no insult or injury committed by the one against the other would pass unresented."

"As to the American [Civil] War it has manifestly ceased to have any attainable object as far as the Northerns are concerned, except to get rid of some more thousand troublesome Irish and Germans. It must be owned, however, that the Anglo-Saxon race on both sides have shown courage and endurance highly honourable to their stock."

"We see in the East some of the evils which are incident to arbitrary sway. We witness in the West the widespread misery and desolation which are sometimes created by democratic and Republican institutions. We enjoy a happy medium between the extremes of these two forms of Government. Our institutions not only confer happiness and tranquillity upon the people of these realms, but enable them to enjoy the most perfect freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, and of action, unawed and uncontrolled either by the edicts of despotic authority, or by the Lynch law of an ungovernable mob."

"The King of Prussia seems to have made his models of action Charles the first of England and Charles the Tenth of France and Bismarck is an humble Imitator of the Ministers of those Two unfortunate Sovereigns. I hope the King's fate will not be like theirs. The King...is quite wrong in attempting unconstitutionally to force his opinions upon his Parliament. He ought to give way and he will be compelled to give way."

"[Richard Cobden and John Bright] have run a muck against everything that the British Nation respects and values – Crown, Aristocracy, Established Church, Nobility, Gentry and Landowners. They have laboured incessantly to set class against class, and the Poor against the rich."

"Nothing is so difficult to change as the traditional habits of a free people in regard to such things. Such changes may be easily made in despotic countries like Russia, or in countries where notwithstanding theoretical freedom the government and the police are all powerful as in France... Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and all of a sudden adopt an unmeaning jargon of barbarous words representing ideas and things new to their minds. It seems to me to be a dream of pedantic theorists... I see no use however in attempting to Frenchify the English nation, and you may be quite sure that the English nation will not consent to be Frenchified. There are many conceited men who think that they have given an unanswerable argument in favour of any measure they may propose by merely saying that it has been adopted by the French. I own that I am not of that school, and I think the French have much to gain by imitating us than we have to gain by imitating them. The fact is there are a certain set of very vain men like Ewart and Cobden who not finding in things as they are here, the prominence of position to which they aspire, think that they gain a step by oversetting any of our arrangements great or small and by holding up some foreign country as an object of imitation."

"I have read your speech and I must frankly say, with much regret as there is little in it that I can agree with, and much from which I differ. You lay down broadly the Doctrine of Universal Suffrage which I can never accept. I intirely deny that every sane and not disqualified man has a moral right to a vote—I use that Expression instead of “the Pale of the Constitution”, because I hold that all who enjoy the Security and civil Rights which the Constitution provides are within its Pale—What every Man and Woman too have a Right to, is to be well governed and under just Laws, and they who propose a change ought to shew that the present organization does not accomplish those objects...[Your speech] was more like the Sort of Speech with which Bright would have introduced the Reform Bill which he would like to propose than the Sort of Speech which might have been expected from the Treasury bench in the present State of Things. Your Speech may win Lancashire for you, though that is doubtful but I fear it will tend to lose England for you. It is to be regretted that you should, as you stated, have taken the opportunity of your receiving a Deputation of working men, to exhort them to set on Foot an Agitation for Parliamentary Reform—The Function of a Government is to calm rather than to excite Agitation."

"Mr. Gladstone's Doctrine which the Observer praised that every sane man has a moral Right to vote goes straight to universal suffrage which not even the most vehement Reformer has hitherto advocated. Moreover if every sane Man has that Right why does it not also belong to every sane woman Who is equally affected by Legislation and Taxation. The Truth is that a vote is not a Right but a Trust. All the Nation cannot by Possibility be brought together to vote and therefore a Selected few are appointed by Law to perform this Function for the Rest and the Publicity attached to the Performance of this Trust is a Security that it will be responsibly performed."

"I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind, sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes (cheers), and wishes that this country could have been able to draw the sword successfully in their defence (continued cheers); but I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute. (Cheers.) To have sent a fleet in midwinter to the Baltic every sailor would tell you was an impossibility, but if it could have gone it would have been attended by no effectual result. Ships sailing on the sea cannot stop armies on land, and to have attempted to stop the progress of an army by sending a fleet to the Baltic would have been attempting to do that which it was not possible to accomplish. (Hear, hear.) If England could have sent an army, and although we all know how admirable that army is on the peace establishment, we must acknowledge that we have no means of sending out a force at all equal to cope with the 300,000 or 400,000 men whom the 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 of Germany could have pitted against us, and that such an attempt would only have insured a disgraceful discomfiture—not to the army, indeed, but to the Government which sent out an inferior force and expected it to cope successfully with a force so vastly superior. (Cheers.) … we did not think that the Danish cause would be considered as sufficiently British, and as sufficiently bearing on the interests and the security and the honour of England, as to make it justifiable to ask the country to make those exertions which such a war would render necessary."

"As to the notion that the Brazilian nation see the criminality of slave trade and have for ever abjured it such a notion is too childish for a grown man really to entertain, however it may suit the Brazilians to endeavour to make it accepted. The plain truth is that the Portuguese are of all European nations the lowest in the moral state and the Brazilians are degenerate Portuguese, demoralized by slavery and slave trade, and all the degrading and corrupting influences connected with both... I have laboured indefatigably all the time I was at the Foreign Office to put an end to the slave trade, and though not with entire at all events with some considerable success and nothing shall induce me to load my conscience with the guilt of having been a party to promoting its revival. I am afraid Bright has been at you upon these Brazilian matters. He has always professed great horror of slave trade and has invariably opposed the employment of any and every means by which it could be made to cease."

"Mackieson gave me the other day a buffalo hide whip from Africa called in those regions a Peace Maker and used as such in the households of chieftains. Our Peace Makers are our Armstrongs and Whitworths and our engineers."

"If I have in any Degree been fortunate enough to have obtained some share of the Good Will and Confidence of my Fellow-Countrymen, it has been because I have rightly understood the Feelings and Opinions of the Nation, and because they think that I have...endeavoured to maintain the Dignity and to uphold the Interests of the country abroad, and to provide for its security at home."

"I beg to propose to you that toast which is the first to which honour is done in every society of Englishmen, I mean "the Health of Her Majesty the Queen" — a toast which embodies the expression of that which is the deepest and warmest feeling of every Englishman... It could not be expected that man would pursue with diligence and success the pursuits of industry if he were not assured that he would reap in security the fruits which that industry might produce, and I am happy to say that our Army, our Navy, our Militia, and our Volunteers do afford to the people of these realms that security which human arrangements can provide for them. We are happily now at peace with all foreign Powers; but the continuance of that peace is not likely to be less certain when it is known to all foreign nations that the Army, the Navy, the Militia, and the Volunteers of England are in a state of perfect efficiency, and ready if called upon to defend the interests and to maintain the honour and dignity of their country against all who might think fit to assail them."

"As to tenant-right, I may be allowed to say that I think it is equivalent to landlords' wrong."

"Gladstone will soon have it all his own way; and, whenever he gets my place, we shall have strange doings...He is a dangerous man, keep him in Oxford, and he is partially muzzled; but send him elsewhere, and he will run wild."

"Lord Palmerston: Then you did not vote for me, friend Rowcliffe; you preferred voting for a Tory. William Rowcliffe: I did not vote for you, my Lord, for if I had, I should have voted for a Tory."

"Russia will in due time become a power almost as great as the old Roman Empire. She can become mistress of all Asia, except British India, whenever she chooses to take it; and when enlightened arrangements shall have made her revenue proportioned to her territory, and railways shall have abridged distances her command of men will become enormous, her pecuniary means gigantic, and her power of transporting armies over great distances most formidable. Germany ought to be strong in order to resist Russian aggression, and a strong Prussia is essential to German strength."

"The American assault on Ireland under the name of Fenianism may be now held to have failed, but the snake is only scotched and not killed. It is far from impossible that the American conspirators may try and obtain in our North American provinces compensation for their defeat in Ireland."

"Only three people," said Palmerston, "have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it."

"That's Article 98; now go on to the next."

"Die, my dear doctor! That's the last thing I shall do!"

"When we were at war with Russia, and when the nation, after trying statesman after statesman, continued in the distressing consciousness that the administration lacked vigour, the man who, for a quarter of a century, had been checkmating the policy of Russia was naturally called for. In no spirit of confidence or enthusiasm,—feeling clearly that others had failed, but by no means certain that the right man was yet discovered,—England said, ‘Try Palmerston.’ It was on the 8th of February, 1855, that the Earl of Derby withdrew, and that he took the helm... The country looked on in hope, beginning to breathe more freely...the practical instinct of the nation gradually decided that Palmerston was the man to whom the business of the war could be committed, and in whose hands the name of England was safe."

"We learned to call him Old Pam, and to love him better than any Prime Minister was ever loved throughout the three kingdoms. All parties in the House took to him. It was pleasant to sit under his parliamentary government, and though there were Liberals more liberal than he, and Conservatives more conservative, the majority both of Liberals and Conservatives secretly preferred him to their special chiefs... Perhaps no single word goes so far in the description of Lord Palmerston as the word ‘manly.’ ... In every respect Lord Palmerston was masculine, not feminine... Lord Palmerston was at all points a man. No sentimental egotism, no moral irritability, no sweet feminine cant about him. A genial stoicism,—not the stoicism of the cynic,—an inestimable faculty of taking the good and leaving the bad alone, an invincible serenity and lightness and brightness of soul, distinguished him."

"In 1864, when Austria and Prussia attacked Denmark, Britain remained neutral. This was due to Queen Victoria, who overruled Lord Palmerston, although that sharp-sighted statesman pointed out that Prussia wanted Kiel as a naval base. Thus we gave Germany her Kiel Canal."

"He is to the middle classes what Feargus O'Connor was to the working classes."

"Then you know what to avoid. Do the exact opposite of what he did. His administration at the Foreign Office was one long crime."

"When I went to Harrow in 1797, the late Lord Palmerston was reckoned the best-tempered and most plucky boy in the school, as well as a young man of great promise. We were in the same house, which was Dr. Bromley's, by whom we were often called when idle "young men of wit and pleasure." The late Lord De Mauley...and myself, were fags to Althorp, Duncannon, and Temple, who messed together; and the latter was by far the most merciful and indulgent. I can remember well Temple fighting "behind school" a great boy called Salisbury, twice his size, and he would not give in, but was brought home with black eyes and a bloody nose, and Mother Bromley taking care of him."

"Even if England still continues to increase in civilization and opulence, she may yet, as other stronger states also rapidly augment, perhaps not long retain her present commanding position in the world; and it may be that in future ages the name of Palmerston will be synonymous with her greatest glory. From one generation of Englishman to another, the saying will be handed down: We are all proud of him."

"In every post alike he showed the qualities that Englishmen love—pluck, good-humour, unflinching care for England's greatness, untiring zeal in the service of the State. His unexhausted, apparently inexhaustible spirits, his splendid physique, his untiring activity of mind and body, seemed proof against the inroads of old age."

"I have heard analogous stories told of the brusqueness or indifference of leaders in more recent times. Almost the only Parliamentary leader against whom such charges were never brought were Melbourne and Palmerston. Both were light-hearted and rather cynical men of the world, and Palmerston's long ascendency was due quite as much to his good humour and jokes and banter as it was to more intellectual qualities."

"Right, in his eyes, was right; and if he insisted upon it when a formidable enemy might be provoked, he treated with becoming scorn the argument that we should deal more gently with an inferior delinquent. "What?" he used to say; "we are to tax our people for the purpose of giving them a strong Government, and then we are not to maintain the rights of our people because their Government is strong. The weaker a Government is, the more inexcusable becomes its insolence or injustice.""

"As we walked along I could gauge the popularity of Lord Palmerston. The moment he came in sight, throughout the whole building, men and women, young and old, at once were struck as by an electric shock. “Lord Palmerston! Here is Lord Palmerston! Bravo! Hurrah! Lord Palmerston for ever!” And so it went on through the whole building. One voice: “I wish you may be Minister for the next twenty years”."

"He is the Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet."

"He said he had had two great objects always before him in life—one the suppression of the slave trade, the other to put England in a state of defence."

"A Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston: "If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman"; to which Pam coolly replied: "If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.""

"Palmerston had two admirable qualities. He had an intense love of Constitutional freedom everywhere; and he had a profound hatred of negro slavery... I should not ascribe to him the overpowering conscientiousness which I ascribe to Peel."

"Never...did I meet with any one that could tell a story with greater effect than the late Lord Palmerston."

"A member of Lord Palmerston's Cabinet gave me an amusing description of their proceedings. At the beginning of the session, and after each holiday, Mr. Gladstone used to come in charged to the muzzle with all sorts of schemes of all sorts of reforms which were absolutely necessary in his opinion to be immediately undertaken. Lord Palmerston used to look fixedly at the paper before him, saying nothing until there was a lull in Gladstone's outpouring. He then rapped the table and said cheerfully, “Now, my lords and gentlemen, let us go to business.”"

"Nothing will induce her Majesty to have Palmerston... Her dislike of him is, in fact, of very long standing, and partly on moral and partly on political grounds. There are old offences, when he was at the Foreign Office, which sunk deep in her mind, and besides this the recollection of his conduct before her marriage, when in her own palace he made an attempt on the person of one of her ladies, which she very justly resented as an outrage to herself. Palmerston, always enterprising and audacious with women, took a fancy to Mrs. Brand (now Lady Dacre) and at Windsor Castle where she was in waiting, and he was a guest, he marched into her room one night. His tender temerity met with an invincible resistance. The lady did not conceal her attempt, and it came to the Queen's ears. Her indignation was somehow pacified by Melbourne, then all-powerful, and who on every account would have abhorred an esclandre in which his colleague and brother-in-law would have so discreditably figured. Palmerston got out of the scrape with his usual luck, but the Queen has never forgotten and will never forgive it."

"I cannot find any fault with Lord Palmerston's bearing on that July day [in 1847]. With all his natural tendency to caustic criticism, he was courteous and fair... Lord Palmerston was an aristocrat; no doubt about that. But he was genial, frank, and generous. Moreover he abhorred cant in every form... Coming over to England in 1878, I was told the following incident of Lord Palmerston, then dead some 13 years. It happened that some of the working class Radicals of the time were in the lobby of "the House" with the view of soliciting subscriptions from Liberal members for some unfortunate of the "advanced" corps, stricken down by disease, and suffering from that other and too common ill—impecuniosity; when the Premier was seen approaching. Said one of the party—"Here comes Pam, let us try him." The idea was pooh-pooh'd, but it was carried out by the suggestor. Lord Palmerston patiently listened to the story and responded with his usual kindly liberality, accompanying the gift by some pleasantry as was his wont. He had faced toward the chamber of the Commons, when suddenly turning back, he enquired, "Can you tell me what has become of an old Chartist acquaintance of mine, Mr. George Julian Harney?" The person addressed could not tell, but an older man of the group said he believed Julian Harney was in America. Lord Palmerston rejoined, "Well, I wish him good fortune: he gave me a dressing down at Tiverton some years ago, and I have not heard of him since; but I hope he is doing well.""

"Towards the end of his life, Lord Palmerston was invited to Bradford to lay the foundation-stone of the new Exchange. On that occasion, the working men were desirous of presenting an address to him, upon their wish for an extension of the franchise. Mr. Ripley, chairman of the Exchange Committee, utterly ignorant of Lord Palmerston's nature, refused to permit any approach to him. The worst enemy of Lord Palmerston could not have done him a worse service. Nothing would have pleased him better than to have met a working-class deputation. His personal heartiness, his invincible temper, his humour and ready wit would have captivated the working men, and sent them away enthusiastic, although without anything to be enthusiastic about."

"Wherever there is an absolute tyranny in Europe, his Lordship is looked upon with hatred or mistrust, and wherever there is a desire for constitutional liberty, repressed by bayonets or threatened by irresponsible autocrats, there has his Lordship admirers and friends."

"Palmerston, rex and autocrat, is, for a Minister finding himself in such fortunate circumstances, far too irritable and violent."

"[David Lloyd George said] he would see that an enormous amount of equipment & ammunition were supplied to the Abyssinians, which would enable them to put up a good fight. He says he feels sure that that is what Palmerston would have done."

"He loved his country and his country loved him. He lived for her honour, and she will cherish his memory."

"It was the singular position of Lord Palmerston that explained the qualified support given to him by some Conservatives. They found it hard to take part against a gay old Tory of the older school, disguising himself as a “Liberal,” and hoaxing the Reform Club. As a matter of sentiment, many Conservatives refused to deal roughly with one whom they regarded as a sort of Parliamentary grandpapa."

"As a Minister, although I often differed from him, I looked upon him as one of our greatest, especially in his knowledge of foreigners and their character. He was clear headed, always knew what he wanted, and was determined to carry it out, with great moral and physical courage. We shall be long ere we see his like again. He was English to the backbone."

"Although a septuagenarian, and since 1807 occupying the public stage almost without interruption, he contrives to remain a novelty, and to evoke all the hopes that used to centre on an untried and promising youth. With one foot in the grave, he is supposed not yet to have begun his true career. If he were to die tomorrow, all England would be surprised to learn that he had been a Secretary of State half this century. If not a good statesman of all work, he is at least a good actor of all work. He succeeds in the comic as in the heroic—in pathos as in familiarity—in tragedy as in farce; although the latter may be more congenial to his feelings. He is not a first-class orator, but an accomplished debater. Possessed of a wonderful memory, of great experience, of consummate tact, of never-failing presence of mind, of gentlemanlike versatility, of the most minute knowledge of Parliamentary tricks, intrigues, parties, and men, he handles difficult cases in an admirable manner and with a pleasant volatility, sticking to the prejudices and susceptibilities of his public, secured from any surprise by his cynical impudence, from any self-confession by his selfish dexterity, from running into a passion by his profound frivolity, his perfect indifference, and his aristocratic contempt. Being an exceedingly happy joker, he ingratiates himself with everybody. Never losing his temper, he imposes on an impassioned antagonist. When unable to master a subject, he knows how to play with it. If wanting in general views, he is always ready to weave a web of elegant generalities. Endowed with a restless and indefatigable spirit, he abhors inactivity and pines for agitation, if not for action. A country like England allows him, of course, to busy himself in every corner of the earth."

"I would walk twenty miles to see him [Palmerston] hanged especially if Thiers were to be strung up with him."

"Englishmen revered Gladstone, but they were never quite sure that they understood him; Palmerston they could pat on the back as one of themselves... His combativeness, his robust, if tactless, patriotism, his capacity for getting into scrapes and his equal capacity for getting out of them, his love of a "scrap," his freedom from malice, his gift for "keeping his end up" —all these things the average Englishman could understand and appreciate, for he saw in them a reflection of his own character."

"Tho' he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. No one else will be able to carry the things thro' the Cabinet as he did. I shall lose a powerful protector... He was much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice."

"Warmed by the instincts of a knightly heart, That roused at once if insult touched the realm, He spurned each Statecraft, each deceiving art, And met his foes, no vizor to his helm. This proved his worth; hereafter be our boast: Who hated Britons hated him the most."

"[Palmerston usually had some answer] ready for me; but one time I regularly shut him up. It was just upon the passing of the Poor Law Act which made legal the separation of man and wife after the age of sixty. I remember that day very well. There was Lady Palmerston there with a lot of ladies looking out of one window of the Three Tuns, all dressed out in ribbons and colours, cheering and laughing in high glee. His Lordship was at the other window speaking to the crowd and when he was going to get rid of this subject of the Poor Law, I ups and says: "You ought to have consulted Lady Palmerston before passing that there Act. How would you and her like to be separated after you was sixty years of age? Are your feelings any finer than those of the poor people you've been legislating for?" His Lordship pretended not to hear that, but I think he did, and so did Lady Palmerston too. That's what I call bringing it home to them."

"I can answer for my noble friend that he will act, not as Minister of Austria, or of Russia, or of France, or of any other country—but as the Minister of England."

"[H]is heart always beat for the honour of England."

"Lord Palmerston is generally regarded as the type of an astute and moderate leader."

"Lord Palmerston is a little too much inclined to consider himself the arbiter of the destinies of Europe. For our part, we are not in the least disposed to allow him to play, in our own affairs, the role of Providence... I must frankly confess that we are tired of his eternal insinuations, of his tone now protective and pedantic, now insulting, but always unbecoming, and we have decided that we shall no longer tolerate it. Lord Palmerston remarked one day to Baron Koller that if we wanted war, we should have it; and I told him that if he wants it he shall have it. I do not know whether Lord Palmerston applies to himself the phrase of Louis XIV, and thinks that ‘l'Angleterre c'est lui’."

"P.'s popularity is wonderful—strange to say, the whole turns on his name. There seems to be no measure, no principle, no cry, to influence men's minds and determine elections; it is simply, 'Were you, or were you not? are you, or are you not, for Palmerston?'"

"But we are afraid of our shadows. I sometimes long for a ruffian like Palmerston or any man who would be more than a string of platitudes and apologies."

"Lord Palmerston is certainly one of the most able, if not the most able, men of business whom I have met in my career... One feature in his character dissipates all these advantages, and prevents him, in my opinion, from ranking as a real statesman. He feels passionately about public affairs, and to the point of sacrificing the most important interests to his resentments. Nearly every political question resolves itself into a personal question in his eyes, and in appearing to defend the interests of his country, it is really the interests of his hate and vengeance that he satisfies."

"Palmerston was the hero of England because he deserved to be. As a European statesman, his objects, though he would have hated to confess it, were the same as Metternich's—the preservation of Peace and Order; but he did not confuse peace with petrification or order with death. He regarded with as much apprehension any extension of French power and was as strongly opposed to revolution, both in itself and because it opened the door to French ambition. But he differed violently and fundamentally as to the means by which Peace and Order were to be preserved. His method was the method of compromise—to grant popular demands while they were moderate and tentative, so as not to be compelled to grant much more extreme demands later; like the soft answer that turneth away wrath, a constitution, he believed, would turn away revolution. For although he regarded revolutionaries as conspirators, he did not regard revolutions as merely conspiracies: discontent seemed to him to show that something was wrong, and it appeared to him more important to put right what was wrong than to suppress the writings of Mazzini."

"It is difficult to think of a Foreign Secretary with a more successful record."

"With his gaiety of spirit and his easygoing morals, he hated tyranny and oppression wherever they occurred... With his dyed whiskers and his red face, Palmerston exemplified British self-confidence and bounce... He was simply an individual of strong personality – resolute, self-confident and with great powers of physical endurance."

"[T]he most English minister that ever governed England."

"He had no reason to be a friend to P. by whom He had been worsted, but that that did not prevent him from regarding him as the first Statesman of this age and perhaps of any other."

"He was one of the earliest and most constant enemies of the Slave Trade; he was a staunch friend of Roman Catholic Emancipation; he abandoned the ground taken up by Canning in advocating the Reform Bill; he was a Freetrader long before Sir Robert Peel became a convert. Above all, he was a steadfast and devoted partisan of constitutional liberty in every part of the Continent."

"The secret and source of his great popularity was his boundless sympathy with all classes of his countrymen... Englishmen were proud of him, not so much because he bearded foreign despots in his prime, or exhibited marvellous physical activity in his old age, as because they believed him to be a stout-hearted and benevolent statesman of the good old English stock... The name of Lord Palmerston, once the terror of the Continent, will long be connected in the minds of Englishmen with an epoch of unbroken peace and unparalleled prosperity."

"Lord Palmerston’s fear was that a weak or disruptive union of Belgium and the Netherlands would eventually invite French interference. French resurgence was his primary fear and its prevention the cornerstone of his foreign policy."

"Palmerston always claimed that his greatest achievement was the creation of Belgium."

"Palmerston, the most feared, the most hated and the most admired statesman in Europe…"

"Part of me wants to say with Wordsworth: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.' But if you ask me was it worth it, I don't think it was. If you pin me against a wall and ask: 'Schama, do you think more human happiness than unhappiness emerged?' I have to say no."

"I remember we thought that, whatever else happened in the remainder of the century, two traditional issues were going to go away. One was the nation, which was simply going to dissolve because the new realities were international. We thought the story of the nation had come to an end in 1945 in the rubble of Berlin. The second was organized religion—the new world realities would be technological. I've been kicking myself ever since. Religion and the persistence of nationalism have proved two of the most overwhelmingly important issues."

"When I started writing [Citizens], I thought the revolution of 1789 then goes on the skids and turns into the Terror of 1793. But I became more and more alarmed by what happened in 1789, and more and more bleak about what it is we are supposed to be celebrating. It dawned on me that no sooner had the Declaration of the Rights of Man been signed than a law was passed which allowed opening of mail, stopped freedom of movement and had a brutal attitude to who was a patriot and who was not. Then there was the violence. It was not the fact of decapitation so much as the way these people self-consciously understood what you could do with violence, the way violence could construct allegiances. I'm not saying no good came of the revolution. There was the definition of a citizen with equal rights before the law, the emancipation of the Jews and black slaves – these were intrinsically noble. But the way the revolution enacts these doesn't accidentally produce violence. It necessarily produces violence. And if you look at the landscape of France in 1799 with Bonapartist military dictatorship, the balance is unhappy rather than happy."

"Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot."

"Landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as layers of rocks... The book [Landscape and Memory] is a celebration of the improbable resilience both of the Earth and of the ability of these cultural contacts to survive the nightmares of late capitalism and late industrialization. I don't want to be understood as some anti-environmentalist, which I am most emphatically not, but I do have an argument with the notion that there is this determined history whereby technological society is necessarily going to mean oblivion for nature."

"If there's one four-letter word that runs through my television history, oddly it is "Rome". Over time, I came to realise that Rome doesn't just come and go in England's history; instead, we have had an extended love-hate relationship with Rome, whether as empire or church."

"Right through British history we see this constant pull between piety and pragmatism, between deference to the monarch as a godlike figure, and a requirement that he runs the business of Albion with practical efficiency."

"To be fully MAGA is still to live, 24/7, within a parallel universe, hermetically closed off from the inconvenient intrusion of fact, blissfully captive to a fantastic theology."

"Inheriting the acronym from the father figure of radio populism, Rush Limbaugh, Trump habitually dismisses his Republican adversaries as Rinos (Republicans In Name Only). But the gravamen of the charges levelled by Liz Cheney and Chris Christie is that the real Rino, the fake conservative, is actually Trump himself."

"Repeatedly, this reviewer was struck by the interest of Schama's comparisons and the manner in which his vignettes illuminate and advance his themes. His understanding of the human creation of place is profound. Schama has produced a great work of imaginative history and a powerful, yet sinuous, narrative. If this method is at times facile and his arguments or examples sometimes forced, his range is astonishing. Few historians could have written a work of this scope and scale."

"This is the most marvellous book I have read about the French Revolution in the last 50 years. It is beautifully written, with, every now and then, the most wonderful throw-away line. Its importance, in view of all the fuss over the bicentenary of the French Revolution, is that it concentrates very sharply on what the French Revolution was really about: violence and random killing, mostly in Paris... The book is beautifully written, fully illustrated, and throughout enlightened with a great deal of compassion as well as humour."

"This is a book to be read and re-read, to be dipped into again and again and savored, because there is only so much that one can take in at a single reading. The writing style is the finest and most appealing by an academician that this reviewer has encountered in decades. In summation, there is hardly a page that does not contain a sentence or a paragraph that one would like to memorize and to quote. The opening paragraph of the book, in fact, will draw the reader to it like a magnet and keep him or her there to the final page. And that is no mean achievement for any writer in any age!"

"Here Schama is at his best, allowing his imagination to roam in a series of free associations. The stories, as throughout the book, are told with verve, a Dickensian delight in idiosyncracies, and a stupendous ability to engage and entertain the reader."

"It is the profusion of detail, and the rush of his anecdotal style that make his book both remarkable and engaging. We may perhaps learn from him how, in postmodernist manner, we may treat landscape as a text, with an impersonal author, history itself. "The sum of our pasts", he writes, "generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.""

"This country is overtaxed and over-governed, and will be more so if the Prime Minister leads, or allows, the Labour Party to have its way. Taxation has got to be reduced, not as a bribe, but as a national necessity. Serious damage will be done to the whole structure of British life from new, vexatious and unnecessary extensions of governmental power at the hands of a party which believes that government alone can make the decisions on which the national life depends. Admire Mr. Wilson's manner as we may, these are things that need to be said. If the Conservative party will not say them, Mr. Wilson will be there (and there rightfully) with a large majority for a long time yet."

"The Conservative party has a serious social purpose which cannot be satisfied by the mere expression of opinion. Its task – in opposition as well as in office – is to do what it can to prevent governmentally controlled changes in the existing social structure. This objective is fundamental. In relation to it everything else is tactical... [T]he Conservative party has a particular commitment to private property – and to inequalities in ownership – as the linchpin of the social and economic order and one of the buttresses of the moral order that is under attack, and this has been so ever since the Labour party became the chief party of opposition."

"What I mean by "liberal"...is a moral rectitude and intellectual certainty claimed by a small but powerful sect of publicists and politicians on behalf of an arbitrary collection of policies, some of which are sensible and some bogus, but which in bulk are made offensive by the way in which they are presented."

"I mean a liberal doctrine and condescending manner which is particularly strong amongst undergraduate politicians and higher journalists, which is to be found in parts of all political parties and which, having its heroes in each generation, in this generation favours Messrs Jenkins, Crosland, Grimond and certain Conservatives whose names can easily be guessed."

"I mean the liberalism which parades conscience more often than conscience ought to be paraded and which assumes that anyone who feels unable to use its language, or support its policies, is an idiot, a knave or a reactionary. I mean the liberalism to be found in the Guardian, the Observer and the new Times whose topics are race relations, crime, Africa, under-developed peoples, the indiscriminate expansion of university education and the maintenance of the illusory influence of a liberal Britain though the multiracial Commonwealth and the United Nations."

"I mean the permissive, metropolitan liberalism which uses the language of protest, progress and the open mind but which has by now become orthodox, predictable and is in many cases the mindless slogan of empty minds. Above all I mean the liberalism which over the last twenty years has encountered virtually no opposition and for which the events of the last six weeks have come as a particularly nasty revelation of the state of public thinking."

"Between 1920 and 1924 the Conservative party made three longterm decisions. The first was to remove Lloyd George from office. The second was to take up the rôle of 'defender of the social order'. The third was to make Labour the chief party of opposition."

"To history, until yesterday, Halifax was the arch-appeaser. This, it is now recognised, was a mistake. His rôle, however, was complicated. In these pages he is not the man who stopped the rot, but the embodiment of Conservative wisdom who decided that Hitler must be obstructed because Labour could not otherwise be resisted."

"As to Solzhenitsyn it is necessary to remark that there is every reason to avoid involvement. He is a Russian, bearing on himself the marks of the Russian experience. There is no common ground between him and us or between his experience and ours. We know well enough without him that the Soviet Union may be dangerous, but we ought also to know that the reason why we should fear her is not the illiberality of her regime but any danger that may arise from her expansion. We know, too, that the Labour party is not Bolshevism, that at its worst it is East German socialism."

"If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill."

"[It is] rational pessimism that provides the strongest justification for a conservative politics."

"[L]ow-keyed respectability...is the real religion of the English people."

"[W]hat Mrs Thatcher seems to have sensed—is that that part of the liberal intelligentsia which grew up in the shadow of Hitler, Spain and Unemployment is deeply alienated from the Labour party. It has never liked trades unions even though, in the form of the 'ragged-trouser generation' (as Mr Stuart Hampshire calls it), it was willing, when young, to profess sympathy for the working classes whom it idolized in ignorance and at a distance and, quite wrongly, regarded as its natural ally in the fight against illiberal, reactionary, capitalistic Conservatism."

"The real objection to Professor Gould...is more far-reaching. It is that under the banner of 'liberal values' he consecrates as desirable an anarchy of opinions which ought in no way to be desired. A society ought to have opinions about which there is no fundamental disagreement and in relation to which it is not the business of universities to adopt a liberalising or questioning attitude. If England is a liberal society in Professor Gould's sense, that ought not to be turned, as he turns it, into a matter of self-congratulation. It is a matter rather for gloom and regret that anyone as clever as he is should consecrate the unthought-out pluralism in which we live, and a matter for serious reflection that, so far as Marxists see this, they perform a valuable, destructive function to disclosing the gulf that divides the doctrinaire liberal from nearly the whole of the rest of the human race."

"In the Conservative conception of freedom...there is a great deal of double-talk and many layers of concealed consciousness. Conservatives, if they talk about freedom long enough, begin to believe that that is what they want. But it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones, so far as political action can do this. And this is wanted not only by those who benefit from inequalities of wealth, rank and education but also by the enormous numbers who, while not partaking in the benefits, recognize that inequalities exist and, in some obscure sense, assume they ought to. They assume, that is to say, that a nation has to be stratified and that stratification entails privilege; and they assume this not as a matter of principle but because it is something to which they are accustomed. They are accustomed to inequalities; inequalities are things they associate with a properly functioning society."

"It is in this context that the freedom rhetoric must be understood. It is a way of speaking which resonates somewhat and seems to have resonated effectively in the last three years. But it is not what Conservatives want, even if it fits in with what they want. Indeed, it is a way of not saying what they want, a way of attracting sympathy and support for, and attributing principle to, a social structure which they wish to conserve or restore."

"The objection of substance to this position is that, in the hands of those who actually believe it, as Mr Lane has shown at the Race Relations Board, it becomes an exercise in liberal fascism, dedicating itself to the improvement of the nation's mind whether the nation's mind wishes to be improved or not, and showing itself only too willing to suppress expressions of opinion that conflict with it."

"[T]he sense of national identity that existed in Britain until at least twenty years ago, with its mixture of common memories, images and expectations, may in places have been eroded; intelligence and skill will be needed if it is to be restored and, more important, extended to those who have never felt it. For this, the Conservative party is no longer as well equipped as it used to be. Europeanism on the one hand has combined with doctrinal antitotalitarianism on the other to create the impression that the object of British policy should be resistance to Marxism. It is not, however, Marxism that it should be the object of British policy to resist. What it should be the object of British policy to resist is any threat to the independence and integrity of the United Kingdom, and in relation to this, EEC, NATO and the Commonwealth are merely instruments with no permanent claim on loyalty or attention. The only permanent claims are those which arise from the national interest defined in terms of sovereignty, historic continuity and national identity, and beyond these no other focus of loyalty is either necessary or desirable."

"Mr Powell attaches the highest value to working-class opinion. It is one of his special audiences and one, moreover, that he thinks deserves a better diet than the awful pieties with which Mr Jenkins and his allies had hoped to lead it into a liberal future. Even without the exigencies of his own Irish situation, he would obviously regard it as a sympathetic support both to his stated opinions about Europe and immigration and to the conception of a unity of national sentiment transcending the divisions of the classes. As the indication of a political position, this would be admirable if it were propounded from inside the Conservative party. It would, indeed, be a form of 'traditional Conservatism', indicating the duties of the elite, demanding from it a rhetorical commitment and establishing resonances between it and the body of the electorate in a way which no other Conservative has succeeded in doing in the last twenty-five years. If Mr Powell were still, or showed signs of wishing once more to become, a party Conservative, he would be in a position to complete the work he begun before he left—of manufacturing a spiritual glue that would bind down the elite and force it to use a language that would bind it to everyone else."

"The object of this volume is to suggest respects in which Mrs Thatcher's stance may be open to improvement. Its message is that a Conservative stance should not only be different from the liberal conservatism of the 1950s but should also avoid the class resentments of the converted socialists of the seventies. It should treat Liberalism and Marxism as similar sorts of doctrine and should approach the former more even that it approaches the latter with satire, ridicule and incredulity. It should feel impelled towards a diffidence, irony or detachment which, whether Christian or cynical, will enable it to avoid ethical earnestness; and it should do this not because ethical earnestness is dangerous but because it is earnest and, as Mr Heath discovered, provides no route to that unity of national sentiment for which Conservatives need to seek."

"From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans."

"If you ask me whether I was deeply Christian, the answer is that I went to college chapel and had a strong polemical Christianity... It could well be that it was a polemical conviction against liberalism rather than a real conviction of the truth of Christianity."

"I suppose on a census I would describe myself as a member of the Church of England. If you ask me, do I think I ought to be an Anglican, the answer is that I probably ought to be a Roman Catholic, but I don't see any prospect of that happening... I'm not saying that I couldn't become a Roman Catholic. What I'm saying at the moment is that I feel quite a large part of the time that I ought to be a Roman Catholic."

"What needs to be explained is not particularly why Roman Catholics go to church, but why Protestants don't. Somehow the gut seems to have gone out of English Protestantism. It's turned into these post-Christian moralistic sentiments."

"I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections."

"Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics."

"I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book. I'm not in favour of Moslems executing death threats or using violence, and they have to observe the law when they're here, but I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. Some thinking Moslems take a view of the nature of religion, and the incompatibility between Islam and liberalism, which runs parallel to what I'm saying in Mill and Liberalism."

"It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939... [F]rom the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat."

"Moral tolerance has not been a dominant feature of Conservative thinking in the past and, however desirable, is unlikely to become one of its dominant features, or indeed a dominant feature of the thinking of Labour voters so long as the gay and lesbian lobbies remain rancid and militant. Aspiration and choice, on the other hand, are qualities which every Conservative leader since Baldwin has applauded without embarrassment or affectation and the Conservative instinct for "social cohesion" has been as central as the search for a new prosperity and "new opportunities for millions of people" in the last 18 years."

"[T]he defence of property, inequality and differentials has been one of the leading motives of historic Conservatism, and that it is doubtful whether the Conservative Party without a strong streak of rural and suburban selfishness would have any reason to exist (any more than the Labour Party would have any reason to exist without its strong streak of working-class selfishness)."

"The present wind of compassion to some extent blew up, and to some extent was blown up artificially, in the two or three years before the general election and has since been prolonged by Princess Diana's death. It is now being replaced by normal politics which will lead eventually to a resumption of the gnarled, sceptical mistrust of all politicians from which Mr Blair will not be exempt and of which Lord Tebbit is the master. It would be a pity if Conservatives were to mistake a temporary aberration for a permanent obsession and were to addict themselves to a style of thinking derived from a period which is passing."

"[U]nlike its "ethical" rivals, the Conservative party does not (in its right mind) pretend to be holier than they are but tends by and large to a decent scepticism, which the public may yet come to admire, about the more obvious forms of political humbug."

"By descent, upbringing and sensibility, Berlin was Russian, Jewish and English. But he misunderstood Russia, Israel and England almost equally. His England was characterised by "toleration...liberty...pluralism and...untidiness" and by a combination of practicality, eccentricity, fair-mindedness, empiricism and common sense. He did not mention the respectability, prejudice, xenophobia, moral conservatism and the low-keyed mistrust of higher thought which are – or perhaps were – also English characteristics."

"A Marxist or Trotskyite interpretation of history raises the question of hegemony or class power in its simplest form, uses the theoretical possibility of revolution to dramatise class-dominance, and promises insights into the unspoken attitudes of the elites and classes which have exercised power in modern England. This promise is unlikely to be fulfilled, however, when there is no attempt to appreciate either the mixture of motives among the "rich swine" or the fact that in most modern societies some of the "rich swine" were once poor swine, and when there is no grasp of the central truth that hegemony and inequality are necessary for cultural and economic development and for social and political stability and freedom, and are in any case the invariable consequence of revolution once revolution has produced new classes or elites to replace the classes and elites which it was designed to overthrow."

"A lot has happened to the student generations of the 1960s and 1970s since they discovered that spontaneous revolutions hardly ever happen. Some have become rich or have taken to conservative reaction; some have taken to liberal progress or to the cautious ambiguities of New Labour. Some have adopted the anti-capitalist sentiment of the Green movement while others have abandoned dirigiste Marxism for libertarian Trotskyism. In all too many (except among the conservative reactionaries and some of the millionaires), there is an entrenched secular orthodoxy which, whether liberal or Trotskyite, is represented as strongly in schools, polytechnics, universities, the media and the social services as on the Labour back-benches in the House of Commons."

"In the attack on the euro, the Conservative party has discovered what looks like a principle which may well have a snowball effect in shaking the moral invulnerability that has been Mr Blair's strongest card since 1997. Nor is it only the euro which may have this effect. No one any longer believes the government's assurances about hospital waiting-lists; everyone understands that taxation, especially on motorists, is too high; and there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the government's devotion to reverse discrimination and the Macpherson Report."

"[T]he [Conservative] party has to do two things. It has not only to propose policies which derive from principles, it has also to create a pork-barrel interest which will persuade groups of electors severally and in detail that they would gain financially from a Conservative government. Secondly, as beneficiary of the public's dislike of the euro, it has to avoid giving offence to electors who agree with it on this issue only and at the same time has to respond to the culture of political mistrust which is the most important feature of the present situation – more important, probably, than hostility to the euro, because it strikes at the new era of sincerity and good feelings of which Mr Blair and Mr Ashdown have been the leaders."

"[T]he most important feelings for Conservatives to be expressing at the moment...are the cynical feelings of disbelief which have been held at bay since May 1997, which are capable of welding middle-class and working-class sentiment together, and which need to be moved out from being Lord Tebbit's speciality into being what, rather vaguely, they are already: the rhetoric with which Mr Redwood, Miss Widdecombe and Mr Hague will expose the higher humbug which emanates from Downing Street."

"Popper's politics were defective in a number of respects. He was obsessed with ideology, and was not interested in the force, fraud, intolerance, accident, subterranean prejudice and state power which help to create and destroy both historic allegiance and the sentiments of nations. He ignored the relationship between the rise of totalitarianism and the collapse of the German, Russian, Austrian and Chinese states and he mistook the Cold War for an aspect of an ethical foreign policy when in truth it was an incident in the development of diplomacy and military power, both aggressive and defensive, on both sides."

"So far as the Labour party is concerned, The Open Society is almost entirely irrelevant. The Labour party from the Webbs to Attlee, though it believed in state-power as the antidote to inequality and competition and misunderstood Stalin's Russia, was neither intellectually Stalinist nor intellectually totalitarian. Its defects were then and are now more domestic and homely – the minority-mindedness and nonconformist conscience which Keynes discerned in Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, the conviction of moral impregnability which makes it intolerant, evasive and querulous when policy conflicts with principle or goodwill stubs its toe on interests, and the sympathy for fads and crankcauses which it inherited from the Liberal party and continues to display in the imprisonment of General Pinochet, the campaign against fox hunting and the nonsense involved in Mr Cook's "ethical foreign policy"."

"[H]e represents a spirit of cantankerous dissent within a profession that always tends to occupy the respectable middle ground. I admire in particular the bracing revisionism of his trilogy of political histories: 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution; The Impact of Labour; and The Impact of Hitler. Many political historians confine themselves to the study of a single political party for which they feel some empathy or enthusiasm. As a result, many admirable and instructive monographs are produced. But they tend to replicate assumptions about the primacy of party, the motives of leading actors, and the representative character of democracy, which are not so much self-evident truths, as the necessary myths of a democratic system. Cowling's purpose was to demythologise democracy by describing the workings of party at the level of high politics. The emphasis he placed upon the autonomy of parliamentary politics, the ambiguous and rhetorical character of leadership, the significance of tensions within and between parties, and the synthetic nature of party conflict, introduced into political history a scepticism that was very much needed, even if it did not represent the whole truth."

"Mr Cowling's work is not only difficult, but comfortless. In his recent works, he implicitly wrestles with the paradox of the Tory party's very survival; how could this pre-democratic party, so many of whose intellectual and spiritual roots were antidemocratic, make such an easy accommodation with democracy? Mr Cowling is the antithesis of a facile Disraelian; in this pamphlet, most of the Tory intellectuals he cites are anti-democratic ones: Burke, Salisbury, Mallock, Eliot, Waugh. Mr Cowling himself straddles a thin margin between anti-democratic and ademocratic. He believes that English civilisation cannot long survive the decline of Anglicanism as a moral and political force."

"Revisionism may appear to have sprung from nowhere but its roots are deep. Institutionally, they are clustered at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where the recently retired don Maurice Cowling established a formidable coterie of disciples. The names are a roll-call of modern Conservative thought: Edward Norman, Alistair Cooke, John Vincent, Roger Scruton and Jonathan Clark are merely the best known. Not all of the new revisionists, of course, were alumni of Peterhouse; but all owed a debt to Cowling."

"This is an exemplary piece of political scholarship."

"[I]t is dangerous, pretentious and unpleasant."

"Maurice Cowling's work on modern English history and society is remarkable not only for its meticulous attention to neglected personalities, but also for its respect for neglected regions of the human psyche. To the surprise of many historians, and the indignation of others, Cowling writes of modern England as though it were a religious community, and as though its spirit were more vividly apparent in the meditations of some minor Cambridge cleric than in the words and deeds of a trade-union leader. Cowling is fascinated by politics: but he sees politics as a poignant outgrowth of forces which live more fully in rituals and prayers. Although he recognises the existence of outstanding leaders, he is persuaded that a leader is made by his followers, and the followers by history. As for history, this is made in many ways; but no force has been more influential in creating the peculiar stamp of modern society than the force of religion."

"I share Maurice Cowling's sense of religion as a primary social force. I also believe that it is no less strong a force in our secular age than it was in the age of faith, even if it is now less predictable and less coherent. Like Cowling, I believe that you can understand a national culture only as an outgrowth of the religious impulse that first set it in motion. And this will be the theme of my essay, which I hope will be a fitting expression of the respect I feel for an eccentric historian, whose eccentricity (like Chesterton's) is also a form of common sense."

"Cowling's project was almost ludicrously reactionary: to roll back the advances of the Enlightenment, to substitute orthodoxy and doctrine for openness and debate. In the fight against "liberal pieties", he considered rudeness ("reactionary bloodiness") to be a virtue, indeed a duty. "Vile" was a term of commendation in Cowling's looking-glass lexicon. "You are evil," he told a young historian with obvious approval. "We must have him," he declared of a candidate for a Fellowship: "he is horrible!" This kind of talk made Cowling an effective teacher: undergraduates found his cynicism both shocking and exhilarating. No doubt his startling inversion of conventional morality stimulated young minds to fresh thought. But his ideas were essentially destructive. As a result of Cowling's influence Peterhouse gained an unenviable reputation for "ill-mannered xenophobic exclusiveness". Discourtesy was not only tolerated, but encouraged. Guest nights frequently degenerated into protracted private parties, at which the bottle circulated until late into the night and the tone deteriorated accordingly. Such an atmosphere made it difficult to bring guests. The lucky ones were ignored; others insulted. A Fellow who brought in a black South African clergyman was embarrassed when some of his colleagues refused to share the table with him. Distinguished Jewish visitors endured anti-Semitic sneers. On the first time she dined in college, the wife of a newly-arrived Fellow found herself seated next to a drunken don, who proceeded to regale her with a detailed description of the sexual tastes of all those around her. A visitor from Merton attending a Peterhouse feast was placed beside Cowling, who said nothing for a long while, then broke his silence with the words, "From the moment you sat down, I knew you were a shit"."

"Maurice Cowling, the Diogenes of the Tory cynical school, reduces the high politics of the 1920s and 1930s to "primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre...a struggle to decide which rhetoric to use and which group was to use it". Yet in the end he finds in both Chamberlain and Halifax "a recognition that the fundamental governing duties...were to exercise power responsibility, subordinate words to their practical purpose and ensure that careless, exuberant, heart-felt rhetoric was subordinated to the primary task of reconciling all classes and all bodies of potential alienation to the politico-social structure from which they derived their authority"."

"It [Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England] is a very odd book indeed – written with all the thoroughness of a first-class technical historian; but no one would recognise it as, in the ordinary meaning of the phrase, a "history of opinion". In large part, it is simply an account of the extraordinary effect which certain brilliant men in the Cambridge of the 1930s and 1940s (Kenneth Pickthorn, Charles Smyth, Edward Welbourne and Herbert Butterfield for instance) had on the mind of an unusually intelligent undergraduate. As I was exposed to precisely the same influence at much the same time the book has for me the appeal of what the BBC would call "a trip down memory lane". For the general reader, however, its importance is greater; for these men (whom Mr. Cowling still looks on, as I do, with the awe of youth) were all unconsciously engaged in giving intellectual expression to a brand of English Conservatism which now seems almost extinct among the articulate but, in those days, represented the unstated assumptions of many generations. The dominant characteristic of that brand was that it was Christian. We were encouraged to believe that the State could not be indifferent to the moral assumptions of its subjects. Society rested on Christian foundations, and it was the positive duty of government to protect these foundations, largely through the agency of an educational system which could not be based on the illusion of ethical objectivity. Beyond that, we learned that the nation-state was probably the best means which human ingenuity had discovered of reconciling freedom with public order, that a government's principal task was to maintain the nation against the seldom distant threat of foreign aggression and the never absent danger of social disintegration."

"The love affair between intellectuals and Marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe, though in Russia itself it began in Marx's own lifetime."

"First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."

"[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism."

"Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed."

"Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle."

"Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners."

"As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports."

"Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential."

"Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory,' middle class,' 'working class,' and 'socialism.' They include 'aristocracy,' as well as 'railway,' 'liberal' and 'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality,' 'scientist,' and 'engineer,' 'proletariat,' and (economic) 'crisis'."

"It is not strictly accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a middle class ideology, though there were many enlighteners—and politically they were the decisive ones—who assumed as a matter of course that the free society would be a capitalist society. In theory its object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it, and indeed came out of it. Yet in practice the leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment called were likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men of ability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which would emerge from their activities would be a ‘bourgeois’ and capitalist one."

"The fundamental fact about Britain in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution was, that the comfortable and rich classes accumulated income so fast and in such vast quantities as to exceed all available possibilities of spending and investment."

"France provided the codes of law, the model of scientific and technical organization, the metric system of measurement for most countries. The ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution."

"For the Napoleonic myth is based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his career. The great known world-shakers of the past had begun as kings like Alexander or patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a continent by sheer personal talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad poems and novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be—the clichés themselves say so—a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilized man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams. For the French he was also something much simpler: the most successful ruler in their long history. He triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established the apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly most—perhaps all—his ideas were anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models for the entire non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world, were Napoleonic. The hierarchy of officials, from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great ‘careers’ of French public life, army, civil service, education, law still have their Napoleonic shapes. He brought stability and prosperity to all except the quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his wars; and even to their relatives he brought glory. No doubt the British saw themselves fighting for liberty against tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible wage-labourers lost the substantial economic benefits of the Revolution. There is little mystery about the persistence of Bonapartism as an ideology of non-political Frenchmen, especially the richer peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870. He had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country."

"In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages."

"The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services, and hygenic ignorance, which conditions (as in the troops) practically everybody."

"One provision of the international peace settlement must, however, be mentioned separately: the abolition of the international slave-trade. The reasons for this were both humanitarian and economic: slavery was horrifying, and extremely inefficient. Moreover, from the point of view of the British who were the chief international champions of this admirable movement among the powers, the economy of 1815–48 no longer rested, like that of the eighteenth century, on the sale of men and of sugar, but on that of cotton goods. The actual abolition of slavery came more slowly (except, of course, where the French Revolution had already swept it away)."

"Rarely has the incapacity of governments to hold up the course of history been more conclusively demonstrated than in the generation after 1815. To prevent a second French Revolution, or the even worse catastrophe of a general European revolution on the French model, was the supreme object of all the powers which had just spent more than twenty years in defeating the first; even of the British, who were not in sympathy with the reactionary absolutism which re-established themselves all over Europe and knew quite well that reforms neither could nor ought to be avoided, but who feared a new Franco-Jacobin expansion more than any other international contingency. And yet, never in European history and rarely anywhere else has revolutionarism been so endemic, so general, so likely to spread by spontaneous contagion as well as by deliberate propaganda."

"Nothing like nationalism is discoverable elsewhere, for the social conditions for it did not exist. In fact, if anything the forces which were later to produce nationalism were at this stage opposed to the alliance of tradition, religion and mass poverty which produced the most powerful resistance to the encroachment of western conquerors and exploiters."

"These three factors—the influence of the French Revolution, the rational economic argument of civil servants, and the greed of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia between 1807 and 1816."

"Of all the economic consequences of the age of dual revolution this division between the ‘advanced’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries proved to be the most profound and the most lasting."

"No groups of the population welcomed the opening of the career to talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been debarred from eminence not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination."

"The alternative to escape or defeat was rebellion. And such was the situation of the labouring poor, and especially the industrial proletariat which became their nucleus, that rebellion was not merely possible, but virtually compulsory. Nothing was more inevitable in the first half of the nineteenth century than the appearance of labour and socialist movements, and indeed of mass social revolutionary unrest."

"For most of history and over most of the world (China being perhaps the main exception) the terms in which all but a handful of educated and emancipated men thought about the world were those of traditional religion, so much so that there are countries in which the word ‘Christian’ is simply a synonym for ‘peasant’ or even ‘man’."

"Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament. Of all the ideological changes this is by far the most profound, though its practical consequences were more ambiguous and undetermined than was then supposed. At all events, it is the most unprecedented."

"Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general language of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism..."

"Except perhaps for such irreducible sexual groups as parents and their children, the ‘man’ of classical liberalism (whose literary symbol was Robinson Crusoe) was a social animal only insofar as he co-existed in large numbers. Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. Happiness (a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual’s supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was plainly the aim of society."

"But even the arts of a small minority in society can still echo the thunder of the earthquakes which shake all humanity. The literature and arts of our period did so, and the result was ‘Romanticism’. As a style, a school, an era in the arts, nothing is harder to define or even to describe in terms of formal analysis; not even ‘classicism’ against which ‘romanticism’ claimed to raise the banner of revolt. The romantics themselves hardly help us, for though their own descriptions of what they were after were firm and decided, they were also often quite devoid of rational content."

"To draw a parallelism between the arts and the sciences is always dangerous, for the relationships between either and the society in which they flourish is quite different. Yet the sciences too in their way reflected the dual revolution, partly because it made specific new demands on them, partly because it opened new possibilities for them and faced them with new problems, partly because its very existence suggested new patterns of thought."

"The progress of science is not a simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of posing of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems."

"In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard 'the full sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under the kingdom in Europe to its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris. 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst."

"People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal."

"The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported. This relation between the ordinary peasant and the rebel, outlaw and robber is what makes social banditry interesting and significant."

"'Crocco' (Carmine Donatelli), A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side."

"Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility."

"Still the dualism of the revolution of 1789 to 1848 gives the history of that period both unity and symmetry. It is in a sense easy to write and read about, because it appears to possess a clear theme and a clear shape, and its chronological limits are as clearly defined as we have any right to expect in human affairs."

"Above all, history – social and economic structure – and politics divided the revolutionary zone into two parts, whose extremes appeared to have little in common. Their social structure differed fundamentally, except for the substantial and pretty universal prevalence of countrymen over townsmen, of small towns over big cities; a fact easily overlooked, because the urban population and especially the large cities were disproportionately prominent in politics."

"The defenders of the social order had to learn the politics of the people. This was the major innovation brought about by the 1848 revolutions. Even the most arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered during that year that they required a newspaper capable of influencing ‘public opinion’ – in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy."

"When we write the ‘world history’ of earlier periods, we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contacts, unless the inhabitants of some region had conquered or colonized another, as the west Europeans did the Americas."

"We are today more familiar than the men of the mid-nineteenth century with this drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world. Yet there is a substantial difference between the process as we experience it today and that in the period of this book. What is most striking about it in the later twentieth century is an international standardization which goes far beyond the purely economic and technological. In this respect our world is more massively standardized than Phileas Fogg’s, but only because there are more machines, productive installations and businesses."

"Increasingly, therefore, the formal international structure came to diverge from the real one. International politics became global politics, in which at least two non-European powers were to intervene effectively, though this was not evident until the twentieth century. Furthermore, it became a sort of oligopoly of capitalist-industrial powers, jointly exercising a monopoly over the world, but competing among themselves; though this did not become evident until the era of ‘imperialism’ after the end of our period."

"If nationalism was one historic force recognized by governments, ‘democracy’, or the growing role of the common man in the affairs of state, was the other. The two were the same, in so far as nationalist movements in this period became mass movements, and certainly at this point pretty well all radical nationalist leaders supposed them to be identical. However, as we have seen, in practice large bodies of common people, such as peasants, still remained unaffected by nationalism even in the countries in which their participation in politics was seriously considered, while others, notably the new working classes, were being urged to follow movements which, at least in theory, put a common international class interest above national affiliations."

"As capitalism and bourgeois society triumphed, the prospects of alternatives to it receded, in spite of the emergence of popular politics and labour movements. These prospects could hardly have seemed less promising in, say 1872–3. And yet within a very few years the future of the society that had triumphed so spectacularly once again seemed uncertain and obscure, and movements to replace it or to overthrow it had once again to be taken seriously. We must therefore consider these movements for radical social and political change as they existed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century."

"The era of liberal triumph began with a defeated revolution and ended in a prolonged depression. The first forms a more convenient signpost for marking the beginning or end of a historical period than the second, but history does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it."

"Where historians try to come to grips with a period which has left surviving eyewitnesses, two quite different concepts of history clash, or, in the best of cases, supplement each other: the scholarly and the existential, archive and personal memory. For everyone is a historian of his or her own consciously lived lifetime inasmuch as he or she comes to terms with it in the mind – an unreliable historian from most points of view, as anyone knows who has ventured into ‘oral history’, but one whose contribution is essential. Scholars who interview old soldiers or politicians will have already acquired more, and more reliable, information about what happened from print and paper, than their source has in his or her memory, but may nevertheless misunderstand it. And, unlike, say, the historian of the crusades, the historian of the Second World War can be corrected by those who, remembering, shake their head and tell him or her: ‘But it was not like that at all.’ Nevertheless, both the versions of history which thus confront one another are, in different senses, coherent constructions of the past, consciously held as such and at least potentially capable of definition."

"Most observers in the 1870s would have been far more impressed by its linearity. In material terms, in terms of knowledge and the capacity to transform nature it seemed so patent that change meant advance that history – at all events modern history – seemed to equal progress. Progress was measured by the ever rising curve of whatever could be measured, or what men chose to measure. Continuous improvement, even of those things which clearly still required it, was guaranteed by historical experience. It seemed hardly credible that little more than three centuries ago intelligent Europeans had regarded the agriculture, military techniques and even the medicine of the ancient Romans as the model for their own, that a bare two centuries ago there could be a serious debate about whether the moderns could ever surpass the achievement of the ancients, and that at the end of the eighteenth century experts could have doubted whether the population of Britain was increasing."

"A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the ‘advanced’ dominated the ‘backward’; in short into a world of empire. But, paradoxically, the era from 1875 to 1914 may be called the Age of Empire not only because it developed a new kind of imperialism, but also for a much more old-fashioned reason. It was probably the period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially calling themselves, or regarded by western diplomats as deserving the title of, ‘emperors’ was at its maximum."

"[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so."

"Nevertheless it is evident — if only from the Greek example just cited — that proto-nationalism, where it existed, made the task of nationalism easier, however great the differences between the two, insofar as existing symbols and sentiments of proto-national community could he mobilized behind a modern cause or a modern state. But this is far from saying that the two were the same, or even that one must logically or inevitably lead into the other. For it is evident that proto-nationalism alone is clearly not enough to form nationalities, nations, let alone states."

"However, mass expulsion and even genocide began to make their appearance on the southern margins of Europe during and after World War I, as the Turks set about the mass extirpation of the Armenians in 1915 and, after the Greco Turkish war of 1911, expelled between 1.3 and 1.5 millions of Greeks from Asia Minor, where they had lived since the days of Homer. Subsequently Adolph Hitler, who was in this respect a logical Wilsonian nationalist, arranged to transfer Germans not living on the territory of the fatherland, such as those of Italian South Tyrol, to Germany itself, as he also arranged for the permanent elimination of the Jews."

"My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century this is inevitably also a autobiographical endeavor. We are talking about, amplifying (and correcting) our own memories. And we are talking as men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways,in its history as actors in its dramas - however insignificant our parts - as observers of our times and, not least, as people whose views of the century have been formed by what we have come to see as its crucial events."

"The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century."

"The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917."

"In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler."

"Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production."

"The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative."

"Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed,sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."

"The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i.e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static."

"The cultural revolution of the later twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures. For such textures had consisted not only of the actual relations between human beings and their forms of organization but also of the general models of such relations and the texted patterns of people's behaviour towards each other; their roles were prescribed, though not always written. Hence the often traumatic insecurity when older conventions of behaviour were either overturned or lost their rationale, or the incomprehension between those who felt this loss and those too young to have known anything but anomic society."

"The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless."

"The tragedy of the October revolution was precisely that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism."

"As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate , brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer."

"Communism as an ideology had been passionately committed to women's equality and liberation, in every sense including the erotic, in spite of Lenin's own dislike of casual sexual promiscuity. (However, both Krupskaya and Lenin were among the rare revolutionaries who specifically favored the sharing of housework between the sexes)...Yet, with rather rare exceptions...they were not prominent in the first political ranks of their parties, or indeed at all, and in the new communist-governed states they became even less visible. Indeed, women in leading political functions virtually disappeared...When women streamed into a profession opened to them, as in the U.S.S.R., where the medical profession became largely feminized in consequence, it lost status and income. As against Western feminists, most married Soviet women, long used to a lifetime of paid work, dreamed of the luxury of staying at home and doing only one job...whatever the achievements and failures of the socialist world, it did not generate specifically feminist movements,and could indeed hardly have done so, given the virtual impossibility of any political initiatives not sponsored by state and party before the mid-1980s"

"The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity."

"Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes, embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde."

"The art most significantly affected by radio was music, since it was abolished the acoustic or mechanical limitations on the range of sounds. Music, the last of the arts to break out of the bodily prison that confines oral communication, had already entered the era of mechanical production before 1914 with the gramophone, although this was hardly yet within reach of the masses"

"It was the tragedy of modernist artists, Left or Right, that the much more effective political commitment of their own mass movements and politicians - not to mention their adversaries - rejected them. With the partial exception of Futurist-influenced Italian fascism, the new authoritarian regimes of both Right and Left preferred old-fashioned and gigantic monumental buildings and vistas in architecture, inspirational representations in both painting and sculpture, elaborate performances of the classics on stage, and ideological acceptability in literature."

"These and many other attempts to replace history by myth and invention are not merely bad intellectual jokes. After all, they can determine what goes into schoolbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they insisted on a sanitized version of the Japanese war in China for use in Japanese classrooms. Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity by which groups of people today, defining themselves by ethnicity, religion or the past or present borders of states, try to find some certainty in an uncertain and shaking world by saying, 'We are different from and better than the Others.'"

"The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations."

"It is easier to formulate questions than answers, and this paper has taken the easier way rather than the more difficult. And yet, perhaps to ask questions, especially about the experiences we tend to take for granted, is not a valueless occupation. We swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape from it. But our modes of living and moving in this medium require analysis and discussion. My object has been to stimulate both."

"For where we stand in regard to the past, what the relations are between past, present and future are not only matters of vital interest to all: they are quite indispensable. We cannot help situating ourselves in the continuum of our own life, of the family and group to which we belong. We cannot help comparing past and present: that is what family photo albums or home movies are there for. We cannot help learning from it, for that is what experience means. We may learn the wrong things - and plainly we often do - but if we don't learn, or have had no chance of learning, or refuse to learn from whatever past is relevant for our purpose, we are, in the extreme case, mentally abnormal."

"History as inspiration and ideology has a built-in tendency to become self-justifying myth. Nothing is a more dangerous blindfold than this, as the history of modern nations and nationalisms demonstrates."

"Let me put it in paradoxical form. It is equally unhelpful to dismiss Marx because we dislike his demonstration that capitalism and bourgeois society are temporary historical phenomena, and to embrace him simply because we are for socialism, which he thought would succeed them. I believe Marx discerned some basic tendencies with profound insight; but we do not know actually what they will bring. Like so much of the future predicted in the past, when it comes it may be unrecognizable, not because the predictions were wrong but because we were wrong to put a particular face and costume to the interesting stranger whose arrival we were told to expect."

"So let me conclude. History has made progress this century, in a lumbering and zig-zag manner, but genuine progress. In saying this I am implying that it belongs to the disciplines to which the word 'progress' can properly apply, that it is possible to arrive at a better understanding of a process which is objective and real, namely the complex, contradictory, but not adventitious, historical development of human societies in the world. I know that there are people who deny this."

"The history of society is still being constructed. I have in this essay tried to suggest some of its problems, to assess some of its practice, and incidentally to hint at certain problems which might benefit from more concentrated exploration. But it would be wrong to conclude without noting, and welcoming, the remarkably flourishing state of the field. It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it today."

"History, whose subject is the past, is not in a position to be an applied discipline in this sense, if only because no way has yet been discovered to change what has already happened. At most we can make counterfactual speculations about hypothetical alternatives. Of course past, present and future are part of one continuum, and what historians have to say could therefore permit both forecasts and recommendations for the future."

"My argument implies that, divorced from history, economics is a rudderless ship and economists without history have not much idea of where it is sailing to. But I am not suggesting that these defects can be remedied simply be getting some charts, that is by paying more attention to concrete economic realities and historical experience. As a matter of fact, there have always been plenty of economists ready and anxious to keep their eyes open. The trouble is that, if in the mainstream tradition, their theory and method as such has not helped them to know where to look and what to look for."

"If economics is not to remain the victim of history, constantly attempting to apply its tool-kit, generally with a time-lag, to yesterday's developments which have become sufficiently visible to dominate the scene today, it must develop or rediscover this historical perspective. For this may have a bearing not only on tomorrow's problems, about which we ought, if possible, to think before we get swamped by them, but also on tomorrow's theory."

"Economists might conceivably agree on the value of history for their discipline, but not historians about the value of economics for theirs. This is partly because history covers a much wider field. As we have seen, it is an obvious drawback of economics as a subject dealing with the real world that it selects out some and only some aspects of human behaviour as 'economic' and leaves the rest to someone else."

"From the historians' point of view these assumptions must be realistic or they are junk. If we use the assumption of perfect foresight by businessmen to construct data, the question of its empirical validity is crucial. Altering the assumptions, whether about the model or about the data, can make a substantial difference to both the data and the answers."

"In analysing both agricultural change and economic growth in general, non-economic factors cannot be divorced from economic ones - certainly not in the short run. To separate them is to abandon the historical, that is the dynamic, analysis of the economy."

"In short, for everyone engaged in scientific discourse, statements must be subject to validation by methods and criteria which are, in principle, not subject to partisanship, whatever their ideological consequences, and however motivated. Statements not subject to such validation may nevertheless be important and valuable, but belong to a different order of discourse. They pose extremely interesting and difficult philosophical problems, especially when they are clearly in some sense descriptive (for example, in representative art or criticism 'about' some specific creative work or artist), but cannot be considered here. Nor can we here consider statements of the logico-mathematical type, insofar as they are not (as in theoretical physics) linked to validation by evidence."

"Having established the limits beyond which partisanship ceases to be scientifically legitimate, let me argue the case in favour of legitimate partisanship, both from the point of view of the scientific or scholarly discipline and from that of the cause to which the scholar feels committed."

"It is in this situation that political partisanship can serve to counteract the increasing tendency to look inwards, in extreme instances the scholiasm, the tendency to develop intellectual ingenuity for its own sake, the self-insulation of the academy. It may indeed fall victim to the same dangers itself, if a sufficiently large 'field' of a self-insulated partisan scholarship develops."

"The fundamental question in history implies the discovery of a mechanism for both the differentiation of various human social groups and the transformation of one kind of society into another, or the failure to do so. In certain respects, which Marxists and common sense regard as crucial, such as the control of man over nature, it certainly implies unidirectional change or progress, at least over a sufficiently long time-span. So long as we do not suppose that the mechanisms of such social development are the same as or similar to those of biological evolution, there seems to be no good reason for not using the term 'evolution' for it."

"In short, the analysis of modes of production must be based on study of the available material forces of production: study, that is, both of technology and its organization, and of economics. For let us not forget that in the same Preface whose later passage is so often quoted, Marx argued that political economy was the anatomy of civil society. Nevertheless, in one respect the traditional analysis of mops and their transformation must be developed - and recent Marxist work has, in fact, done so. The actual transformation of one mode into another has often been seen in causal and unilinear terms: within each mode, it is argued, there is a 'basic contradiction' which generates the dynamic and the forces that will lead to its transformation. It is far from clear that this is Marx's own view - except for capitalism - and it certainly leads to great difficulties and endless debates, particularly in connection with the passage from Western feudalism to capitalism."

"The major strength of Wolf's book - his concentration on interaction, intermingling and mutual modification - is at the same time its major weakness, since it tends to take for granted the nature of the dynamism which has brought the world from pre-history to the late twentieth century. This is a book about connections rather than causes. Or rather, the author has re-thought the problems of the genesis and development of capitalism less fundamentally than those of the interconnections essential to it."

"Much less useful, I think however, is the search for deep structures and particularly the search for la conscience. I may be entirely heterodox, but I don't think historians have an awful lot to learn from Freud, who was a bad historian, whenever he actually wrote anything about history. I have no opinions about Freud's psychology, but I regard the belated discovery of Freud in France some forty years after the rest of the world as by no means an unqualified plus. It seems to me it is a minus, insofar as it diverts attention into the unconscious or deep structures from, I won't say conscious, but anyway logical cohesion. It neglects system. It seems to me the problem of mentalities is not simply that of discovering that people are different, and how they are different, and making readers feel the difference, as Richard Cobb does so well. It is to find a logical connection between various forms of behaviour, of thinking and feeling, to see them as being mutually consistent. It is, if you like, to see why it makes sense, let us say, for people to believe about famous robbers that they are invisible and invulnerable, even though they obviously are not. We must see such beliefs not purely as an emotional reaction but as part of a coherent system of beliefs about society, about the role of those who believe, and the role of those about whom the beliefs are held."

"I think the programme, for the history of mentalities, is not so much discovery as analysis. What I would like to do is not simply, like Edward Thompson, to save the stockinger and the peasant, but also the nobleman and the king of the past, from the condescension of modern historians who think they know better, who think they know what is logical and theoretical argument."

"Clearly some historians have shifted from 'circumstances' to 'men' (including women), or have discovered that a simple base-superstructure model and economic history are not enough, or - since the pay-off from such approaches has been very substantial - are no longer enough. Some may well have convinced themselves that there is an incompatibility between their 'scientific' and 'literary' functions. But it is not necessary to analyse the present fashions in history entirely as a rejection of the past, and insofar as they cannot be entirely analysed in such terms, it will not do."

"Let us, however, spare a final thought for those whose strange 'lived reality' is evoked successfully by Price's technique: the Moravians. They came to the benighted heathen in conditions which often seemed 'a foretaste of what hell must be like'. Unprepared for the forest, inexperienced, they suffered and died like flies - honest, uncomprehending German tailors, shoemakers or linen weavers in unsuitable European costumes, who could be expected to last a few months or weeks, preaching Jesus the Crucified with Blood and Wounds, among the scorpions and jaguars, before contentedly going home to Him. They were entirely dependent on the maroons, who did not like them as whites, made fun of them and occasionally persecuted them. They played music, and were uncomfortable when the blacks danced to it. They failed in all their endeavours except the heroic task of compiling Brother Schumann's Saramaka-German dictionary in nine pain-wracked months. Their successors are still there and still the Saramakas' only road to reading and writing."

"Grassroots historians spend much of their time finding out how societies work and when they do not work, as well as how they change. They cannot help doing this, since their subject, ordinary people, make up the bulk of any society. They start out with the enormous advantage of knowing that they are largely ignorant of either the facts or the answers to their problems. They also have the substantial advantage of historians over social scientists who turn to history, of knowing how little we know of the past, how important it is to find out, and what hard work in a specialized discipline is needed for the purpose. They also have a third advantage. They know that what people wanted and needed was not always what their betters, or those who were cleverer and more influential, thought they ought to have. These are modest enough claims for our trade. But modesty is not a negligible virtue. It is important to remind ourselves from time to time that we don't know all the answers about society and that the process of discovering them is not simple. Those who plan and manage society now are perhaps unlikely to listen. Those who want to change society and eventually to plan its development ought also to listen. If some of them will, it will be due partly to the work of historians like George Rude."

"'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to sever European history from world history."

"There is no historically homogeneous Europe, and those who look for it are on the wrong track. However we define 'Europe', its diversity, the rise and fall, the coexistence, the dialectical interaction of its components, is fundamental to its existence. Without it, it is impossible to understand and explain the developments which led to the creation and control of the modern world by processes which came to maturity in Europe and nowhere else."

"There are cases - perhaps mine is among them - where this discovery can be particularly helpful. Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution. But there is nothing which can sharpen the historian's mind like defeat."

"The Russian Revolution really has two interwoven histories: its impact on Russia and its impact on the world. We must not confuse the two. Without the second, few except a handful of specialist historians would ever have been concerned with it. Outside the USA not many people know more about the American Civil War than that it is the setting of Gone with the Wind. And yet it was both the greatest war between 1815 and 1914 and by far the greatest in American history, and can also claim to have been something like a second American revolution. It meant and means much inside the USA but very little outside, for it had very little obvious effect on what happened in other countries, other than those beyond its southern borders. On the other hand, both in Russian history and in twentieth-century world history the Russian Revolution is a towering phenomenon - but not the same kind of phenomenon. What has it meant for the Russian peoples? It brought Russia to the peak of its international power and prestige - far beyond anything achieved under the Tsars. Stalin is as certain of a major permanent place in Russian history as Peter the Great. It modernized much of a backward country, but although its achievements were titanic - not least the ability to defeat Germany in the Second World War - their human cost was enormous, its dead-end economy was destined to run down and its political system broke down. Admittedly, for most of its inhabitants who can remember, the old Soviet era certainly looks far better than what the former Soviet peoples are going through now, and will go on doing so for a good long while. But it is too early to draw up a historical balance-sheet."

"Under these circumstances of social and political disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case, and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the Enlightenment had erected against barbarism, and which I have tried to sketch in this lecture. For the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable. Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money."

"In short, on the questions with which historical research and theoretical reaction can deal, there was and could be no difference in substance between scholars for whom the identity problems of Civitella were insignificant or uninteresting and a historian for whom they were existentially central. All historians present hoped to agree about the formulation of the questions about the Nazi atrocities, though one would not necessarily expect them to agree about them. All agreed about the procedures for answering these questions, the nature of the possible evidence which would allow them to be answered - insofar as the answers depended on evidence - and about the comparability of events which were experienced by the participants as unique and incommunicable. Conversely, those who were unwilling to submit their, or their community's, experience to these procedures, or who refused to accept the results of such tests, were outside the discipline of history, however much historians respected their motives and feelings. In fact, among the historians present there was an impressive consensus on matters of substance. It contrasted strikingly with the chaos of varied and conflicting emotions which agitated the participants."

"The internal and external pressures to do so may be great. Our passions and interests may urge us in this direction. Every Jew, for instance, whatever his or her occupation, instinctively accepts the force of the question with which, during many threatening centuries, members of our minority community confronted any and every event in the wider world: Is it good for the Jews? Is it bad for the Jews?' In times of discrimination or persecution it provided guidance - though not necessarily the best guidance - for private and public behaviour, a strategy at all levels for a scattered people. Yet it cannot and should not guide a Jewish historian, even one who writes the history of his own people. Historians, however microcosmic, must be for universalism, not out of loyalty to an ideal to which many of us remain attached but because it is the necessary condition for understanding the history of humanity, including that of any special section of humanity. For all human collectivities necessarily are and have been part of a larger and more complex world. A history which is designed only for Jews (or African-Americans, or Greeks, or women, or proletarians, or homosexuals) cannot be good history, though it may be comforting history to those who practise it."

"Nothing is easier than to see the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount as 'the first socialist' or communist, and though the majority of early socialist theorists were not Christians, many later members of socialists movements have found this reflection useful."