Historians from France

"On parle toujours mal quand on n'a rien à dire."

"L'homme doit être content, dit-on; mais de quoi?"

"Le public est une bête féroce: il faut l'enchaîner ou la fuir."

"L'amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu'elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur et le corps."

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

"La vertu s'avilit à se justifier."

"On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité."

"C'est un poids bien pesant qu'un nom trop tôt fameux."

"L'homme est libre au moment qu'il veut l'être."

"Les mortels sont égaux; ce n'est pas la naissance, C'est la seule vertu qui fait la différence."

"Les anciens Romains élevaient des prodiges d'architecture pour faire combattre des bêtes."

"Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker."

"If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness."

"Ainsi, presque tout est imitation. L'idée des Lettres persanes est prise de celle de l'Espion turc. Le Boiardo a imité le Pulci, l'Arioste a imité le Boiardo. Les esprits les plus originaux empruntent les uns des autres. Michel Cervantes fait un fou de son don Quichotte; mais Roland est-il autre chose qu'un fou? Il serait difficile de décider si la chevalerie errante est plus tournée en ridicule par les peintures grotesques de Cervantes que par la féconde imagination de l'Arioste. Métastase a pris la plupart de ses opéras dans nos tragédies françaises. Plusieurs auteurs anglais nous ont copiés, et n'en ont rien dit. Il en est des livres comme du feu de nos foyers; on va prendre ce feu chez son voisin, on l'allume chez soi, on le communique à d'autres, et il appartient à tous."

"Où est l'amitié est la patrie."

"Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre ennuyeux."

"Le superflu, chose très nécessaire."

"Le paradis terrestre est où je suis."

"Tout homme sensé, tout homme de bien, doit avoir la secte chrétienne en horreur."

"Aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l'erreur."

"Usez, n'abusez point; le sage ainsi l'ordonne. Je fuis également Épictète et Pétrone. L'abstinence ou l'excès ne fit jamais d'heureux."

"Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire."

"Une seule partie de la physique occupe la vie de plusieurs hommes, et les laisse souvent mourir dans l'incertitude."

"Ne peut-on pas remonter jusqu'à ces anciens scélérats, fondateurs illustres de la superstition et du fanatisme, qui, les premiers, ont pris le couteau sur l'autel pour faire des victimes de ceux qui refusaient d'etre leurs disciples?"

"Mais qu'un marchand de chameaux excite une sédition dans sa bourgade; qu'associé à quelques malheureux coracites il leur persuade qu'il s'entretient avec l'ange Gabriel; qu'il se vante d'avoir été ravi au ciel, et d'y avoir reçu une partie de ce livre inintelligible qui fait frémir le sens commun à chaque page; que, pour faire respecter ce livre, il porte dans sa patrie le fer et la flamme; qu'il égorge les pères, qu'il ravisse les filles, qu'il donne aux vaincus le choix de sa religion ou de la mort, c'est assurément ce que nul homme ne peut excuser, à moins qu'il ne soit né Turc, et que la superstition n'étouffe en lui toute lumière naturelle."

"Le premier qui fut roi fut un soldat heureux: Qui sert bien son pays n'a pas besoin d'aïeux."

"Les habiles tyrans ne sont jamais punis."

"Il vaut mieux hasarder de sauver un coupable que de condamner un innocent."

"C'est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes."

"The king [Frederic] has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time."

"Qui plume a, guerre a."

"C'est une des superstitions de l'esprit humain d'avoir imaginé que la virginité pouvait être une vertu."

"Prier Dieu c'est se flatter qu'avec des paroles on changera toute la nature."

"Nous cherchons tous le bonheur, mais sans savoir où, comme les ivrognes qui cherchent leur maison, sachant confusément qu'ils en ont une."

"Si Dieu nous a faits à son image, nous le lui avons bien rendu."

"Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort."

"Un ministre est excusable du mal qu'il fait, lorsque le gouvernail de l'État est forcé dans sa main par les tempêtes; mais dans le calme il est coupable de tout le bien qu'il ne fait pas."

"Elle [la nation juive] ose étaler une haine irréconciliable contre toutes les nations; elle se révolte contre tous ses maîtres. Toujours superstitieuse, toujours avide du bien d'autrui, toujours barbare, rampante dans le malheur, et insolente dans la prospérité."

"Un peuple qui trafique de ses enfants est encore plus condamnable que l'acheteur: ce négoce démontre notre supériorité; ce qui se donne un maître était né pour en avoir."

"I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society—from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many consolations—have never been painted in more striking colours: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this natural habit to those more fit for it than are you and I."

"Ce corps qui s'appelait et qui s'appelle encore le saint empire romain n'était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire."

"En aimant tant la gloire, comment pouvez-vous vous obstiner à un projet qui vous la fera perdre?"

"Les opinions ont plus causé de maux sur ce petit globe que la peste et les tremblements de terre."

"Mari qui veut surprendre est souvent fort surpris.[HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/books?id=dig6AAAAcAAJ&q=%22mari+qui+veut+furprendre+eft+fouvent+fort+furpris%22&pg=PA34#v=onepage]"

"If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?"

"Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege."

"Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want."

"In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense."

"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin; "it is the only way to make life endurable."

"Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste."

"Fools admire everything in an author of reputation."

""Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!"

""You're a bitter man," said Candide. "That's because I've lived," said Martin."

"Let us cultivate our garden."

"Il faut toujours en fait de nouvelles attendre le sacrement de la confirmation."

"Quand il s'agit d'argent, tout le monde est de la même religion."

"Il y a des vérités qui ne sont pas pour tous les hommes et pour tous les temps."

"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande."

"Quoi que vous fassiez, écrasez l'infâme, et aimez qui vous aime."

"La superstition est à la religion ce que l'astrologie est à l'astronomie, la fille très folle d'une mère très sage. Ces deux filles ont longtemps subjugué toute la terre."

"Mais, monsieur, en étant persuadés par la foi, des choses qui paraissent absurdes à notre intelligence, c'est-à-dire, en croyant ce que nous ne croyons pas, gardons-nous de faire ce sacrifice de notre raison dans la conduite de la vie. Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois: Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l'avons ordonné; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l'ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n'opposez point aux ordres de croire l'impossible l'intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur. Une faculté de votre âme étant une fois tyrannisée, toutes les autres facultés doivent l'être également. Et c'est là ce qui a produit tous les crimes religieux dont la terre a été inondée."

"Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices, et n'emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées."

"La nôtre [religion] est sans contredit la plus ridicule, la plus absurde, et la plus sanguinaire qui ait jamais infecté le monde.Votre Majesté rendra un service éternel au genre humain en détruisant cette infâme superstition, je ne dis pas chez la canaille, qui n'est pas digne d'être éclairée, et à laquelle tous les jougs sont propres; je dis chez les honnêtes gens, chez les hommes qui pensent, chez ceux qui veulent penser... Je ne m'afflige de toucher à la mort que par mon profond regret de ne vous pas seconder dans cette noble entreprise, la plus belle et la plus respectable qui puisse signaler l'esprit humain."

"Où est le prince assez instruit pour savoir que depuis dix-sept cents ans la secte chrétienne n'a jamais fait que du mal?"

"A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity"

"Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees."

"J'ai toujours fait une prière à Dieu, qui est fort courte. La voici: Mon Dieu, rendez nos ennemis bien ridicules! Dieu m'a exaucé."

"En effet, l'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs."

"Un bon mot ne prouve rien."

"Il est bien malaisé (puisqu'il faut enfin m'expliquer) d'ôter à des insensés des chaînes qu'ils révèrent."

"La vie est hérissée de ces épines, et je n'y sais d'autre remède que de cultiver son jardin."

"C'est une grande question parmi eux s'ils [les africains] sont descendus des singes ou si les singes sont venus d'eux. Nos sages ont dit que l'homme est l'image de Dieu: voilà une plaisante image de l'Être éternel qu'un nez noir épaté, avec peu ou point d'intelligence! Un temps viendra, sans doute, où ces animaux sauront bien cultiver la terre, l'embellir par des maisons et par des jardins, et connaître la route des astres il faut du temps pour tout."

"On dit que Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons."

"Toutes les histoires anciennes, comme le disait un de nos beaux esprits, ne sont que des fables convenues."

"Being of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a sect as the Quakers were very well deserving the curiosity of every thinking man, I resolved to make myself acquainted with them, and for that purpose made a visit to one of the most eminent of that sect in England, who, after having been in trade for thirty years, had the wisdom to prescribe limits to his fortune, and to his desires, and withdrew to a small but pleasant retirement in the country, not many miles from London. Here it was that I made him my visit. His house was small, but neatly built, and with no other ornaments but those of decency and convenience."

"He advanced toward me without moving his hat, or making the least inclination of his body; but there appeared more real politeness in the open, humane air of his countenance, than in drawing one leg behind the other, and carrying that in the hand which is made to be worn on the head. "Friend," said he, "I perceive thou art a stranger, if I can do thee any service thou hast only to let me know it." "Sir," I replied, bowing my body, and sliding one leg toward him, as is the custom with us, "I flatter myself that my curiosity, which you will allow to be just, will not give you any offence, and that you will do me the honor to inform me of the particulars of your religion." "The people of thy country," answered the Quaker, "are too full of their bows and their compliments; but I never yet met with one of them who had so much curiosity as thyself. Come in and let us dine first together.""

"I opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. "My dear sir," said I, "were you ever baptized?" "No, friend," replied the Quaker, "nor any of my brethren." "Zounds!" said I to him, "you are not Christians then!" "Friend," replied the old man, in a soft tone of voice, "do not swear; we are Christians, but we do not think that sprinkling a few drops of water on a child's head makes him a Christian." "My God!" exclaimed I, shocked at his impiety, "have you then forgotten that Christ was baptized by St. John?" "Friend," replied the mild Quaker, "once again, do not swear. Christ was baptized by John, but He Himself never baptized any one; now we profess ourselves disciples of Christ, and not of John." "Mercy on us," cried I, "what a fine subject you would be for the holy inquisitor! In the name of God, my good old man, let me baptize you.""

"I asked my guide how it was possible the judicious part of them could suffer such incoherent prating? "We are obliged," said he, "to suffer it, because no one knows, when a brother rises up to hold forth, whether he will be moved by the spirit or by folly. In this uncertainty, we listen patiently to every one. We even allow our women to speak in public; two or three of them are often inspired at the same time, and then a most charming noise is heard in the Lord's house." "You have no priests, then?" said I. "No, no, friend," replied the Quaker; "heaven make us thankful!" Then opening one of the books of their sect, he read the following words in an emphatic tone: "'God forbid we should presume to ordain any one to receive the Holy Spirit on the Lord's day, in exclusion to the rest of the faithful!'"

"The Quakers date their epoch from Christ, who, according to them, was the first Quaker. Religion, say they, was corrupted almost immediately after His death, and remained in that state of corruption about sixteen hundred years. But there were always a few of the faithful concealed in the world, who carefully preserved the sacred fire, which was extinguished in all but themselves; till at length this light shone out in England in 1642. It was at the time when Great Britain was distracted by intestine wars, which three or four sects had raised in the name of God, that one George Fox, a native of Leicestershire, and son of a silk-weaver, took it into his head to preach the Word, and, as he pretended, with all the requisites of a true apostle; that is, without being able either to read or write. He was a young man, about twenty-five years of age, of irreproachable manners, and religiously mad. He was clad in leather from head to foot, and travelled from one village to another, exclaiming against the war and the clergy."

"This new patriarch Fox said one day to a justice of peace, before a large assembly of people. "Friend, take care what thou dost; God will soon punish thee for persecuting his saints." This magistrate, being one who besotted himself every day with bad beer and brandy, died of apoplexy two days after; just as he had signed a mittimus for imprisoning some Quakers. The sudden death of this justice was not ascribed to his intemperance; but was universally looked upon as the effect of the holy man's predictions; so that this accident made more Quakers than a thousand sermons and as many shaking fits would have done. Cromwell, finding them increase daily, was willing to bring them over to his party, and for that purpose tried bribery; however, he found them incorruptible, which made him one day declare that this was the only religion he had ever met with that could resist the charms of gold. The Quakers suffered several persecutions under Charles II; not upon a religious account, but for refusing to pay the tithes, for "theeing" and "thouing" the magistrates, and for refusing to take the oaths enacted by the laws. At length Robert Barclay, a native of Scotland, presented to the king, in 1675, his "Apology for the Quakers"; a work as well drawn up as the subject could possibly admit. The dedication to Charles II, instead of being filled with mean, flattering encomiums, abounds with bold truths and the wisest counsels. "Thou hast tasted," says he to the king, at the close of his "Epistle Dedicatory," "of prosperity and adversity: thou hast been driven out of the country over which thou now reignest, and from the throne on which thou sittest: thou hast groaned beneath the yoke of oppression; therefore hast thou reason to know how hateful the oppressor is both to God and man. If, after all these warnings and advertisements, thou dost not turn unto the Lord, with all thy heart; but forget Him who remembered thee in thy distress, and give thyself up to follow lust and vanity, surely great will be thy guilt, and bitter thy condemnation. Instead of listening to the flatterers about thee, hearken only to the voice that is within thee, which never flatters. I am thy faithful friend and servant, Robert Barclay." The most surprising circumstance is that this letter, though written by an obscure person, was so happy in its effect as to put a stop to the persecution."

"William Penn, when only fifteen years of age, chanced to meet a Quaker in Oxford, where he was then following his studies. This Quaker made a proselyte of him; and our young man, being naturally sprightly and eloquent, having a very winning aspect and engaging carriage, soon gained over some of his companions and intimates, and in a short time formed a society of young Quakers, who met at his house; so that at the age of sixteen he found himself at the head of a sect. Having left college, at his return home to the vice-admiral, his father, instead of kneeling to ask his blessing, as is the custom with the English, he went up to him with his hat on, and accosted him thus: "Friend, I am glad to see thee in good health." The viceadmiral thought his son crazy; but soon discovered he was a Quaker. He then employed every method that prudence could suggest to engage him to behave and act like other people. The youth answered his father only with repeated exhortations to turn Quaker also. After much altercation, his father confined himself to this single request, that he would wait on the king and the duke of York with his hat under his arm, and that he would not "thee" and "thou" them. William answered that his conscience would not permit him to do these things. This exasperated his father to such a degree that he turned him out of doors. Young Penn gave God thanks that he permitted him to suffer so early in His cause, and went into the city, where he held forth, and made a great number of converts; and being young, handsome, and of a graceful figure, both court and city ladies flocked very devoutly to hear him. The patriarch Fox, hearing of his great reputation, came to London — notwithstanding the length of the journey — purposely to see and converse with him. They both agreed to go upon missions into foreign countries; and accordingly they embarked for Holland, after having left a sufficient number of laborers to take care of the London vineyard."

"William inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted of crown debts, due to the vice-admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea-service. No moneys were at that time less secure than those owing from the king. Penn was obliged to go, more than once, and "thee" and "thou" Charles and his ministers, to recover the debt; and at last, instead of specie, the government invested him with the right and sovereignty of a province of America, to the south of Maryland. Thus was a Quaker raised to sovereign power. He set sail for his new dominions with two ships filled with Quakers, who followed his fortune. The country was then named by them Pennsylvania, from William Penn; and he founded Philadelphia, which is now a very flourishing city. His first care was to make an alliance with his American neighbors; and this is the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed. The new sovereign also enacted several wise and wholesome laws for his colony, which have remained invariably the same to this day. The chief is, to ill-treat no person on account of religion, and to consider as brethren all those who believe in one God. He had no sooner settled his government than several American merchants came and peopled this colony. The natives of the country, instead of flying into the woods, cultivated by degrees a friendship with the peaceable Quakers. They loved these new strangers as much as they disliked the other Christians, who had conquered and ravaged America. In a little time these savages, as they are called, delighted with their new neighbors, flocked in crowds to Penn, to offer themselves as his vassals. It was an uncommon thing to behold a sovereign "thee'd" and "thou'd" by his subjects, and addressed by them with their hats on; and no less singular for a government to be without one priest in it; a people without arms, either for offence or preservation; a body of citizens without any distinctions but those of public employments; and for neighbors to live together free from envy or jealousy. In a word, William Penn might, with reason, boast of having brought down upon earth the Golden Age, which in all probability, never had any real existence but in his dominions."

"It was in the reign of Charles II that they obtained the noble distinction of being exempted from giving their testimony on oath in a court of justice, and being believed on their bare affirmation. On this occasion the chancellor, who was a man of wit, spoke to them as follows: "Friends, Jupiter one day ordered that all the beasts of burden should repair to be shod. The asses represented that their laws would not allow them to submit to that operation. 'Very well,' said Jupiter; 'then you shall not be shod; but the first false step you make, you may depend upon being severely drubbed.'""

"I cannot guess what may be the fate of Quakerism in America; but I perceive it loses ground daily in England. In all countries, where the established religion is of a mild and tolerating nature, it will at length swallow up all the rest."

"Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms."

"La morale est la même chez tous les hommes, donc elle vient de Dieu; le culte est différent, donc il est l'ouvrage des hommes."

"Tel homme qui dans un excès de mélancolie se tue aujourd'hui aimerait à vivre s'il attendait huit jours."

"Ne ressemblons-nous pas presque tous à ce vieux général de quatre-vingt-dix ans, qui, ayant rencontré de jeunes officiers qui faisaient un peu de désordre avec des filles, leur dit tout en colère: "Messieurs, est-ce là l'exemple que je vous donne?""

"Il est triste que souvent, pour être bon patriote, on soit l'ennemi du reste des hommes."

"Sa réputation s'affermira toujours, parce qu'on ne le lit guère."

"Tous les hommes seraient donc nécessairement égaux, s'ils étaient sans besoins. La misère attachée à notre espèce subordonne un homme à un autre homme: ce n'est pas l'inégalité qui est un malheur réel, c'est la dépendance."

"Telle est donc la condition humaine que souhaiter la grandeur de son pays, c'est souhaiter du mal à ses voisins."

"La foi consiste à croire ce que la raison ne croit pas."

"Les hommes vertueux ont seuls des amis."

"Voulez-vous avoir de bonnes lois; brûlez les vôtres, et faites-en de nouvelles."

"Définissez les termes, vous dis-je, ou jamais nous ne nous entendrons."

"Le préjugé est une opinion sans jugement."

"A testimony is sufficient when it rests on: 1st. A great number of very sensible witnesses who agree in having seen well. 2d. Who are sane, bodily and mentally. 3d. Who are impartial and disinterested. 4th. Who unanimously agree. 5th. Who solemnly certify to the fact."

"Qu'est-ce que la tolérance? c'est l'apanage de l'humanité. Nous sommes tous pétris de faiblesses et d'erreurs; pardonnons-nous réciproquement nos sottises, c'est la première loi de la nature."

"Une compagnie de graves tyrans est inaccessible à toutes les séductions."

"The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous."

"What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. [...] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. [...] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun."

"It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels."

"On dit quelquefois, le sens commun est fort rare..."

"Le doute n'est pas un état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule. Ce qui révolte le plus dans le Système de la nature (après la façon de faire des anguilles avec de la farine), c'est l'audace avec laquelle il décide qu'il n'y a point de Dieu , sans avoir seulement tenté d'en prouver l'impossibilité."

"C'est une plaisante chose que la pensée dépende absolument de l'estomac, et malgré cela les meilleurs estomacs ne soient pas les meilleurs penseurs."

"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer."

""Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer." Mais toute la nature nous crie qu'il existe; qu'il y a une intelligence suprême, un pouvoir immense, un ordre admirable, et tout nous instruit de notre dépendance."

"Tous les autres peuples ont commis des crimes, les Juifs sont les seuls qui s'en soient vantés. Ils sont tous nés avec la rage du fanatisme dans le cœur, comme les Bretons et les Germains naissent avec des cheveux blonds. Je ne serais point étonné que cette nation ne fût un jour funeste au genre humain."

"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."

"C’est d’abord une remarque très-importante que Pythagore alla de Samos au Gange pour apprendre la géométrie, il y a environ deux mille cinq cents ans au moins, et plus de sept cents ans avant notre ère vulgaire, si récemment adoptée par nous. Or, certainement Pythagore n’aurait pas entrepris un si étrange voyage si la réputation de la science des brachmanes n’avait été dès longtemps établie de proche en proche en Europe, et si plusieurs voyageurs n’avaient déjà enseigné la route."

"J'aime fort la vérité, mais je n'aime point du tout le martyre."

"Enfin, monsieur, je suis convaincu que tout nous vient des bords du Gange, astronomie, astrologie, métempsycose, etc."

"Je meurs en adorant Dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne haïssant pas mes ennemis et en détestant la superstition."

"On en trouve [l'argent] toujours quand il s'agit d'aller faire tuer des hommes sur la frontière: il n'y en a plus quand il faut les sauver."

"La vertu suppose la liberté, comme le transport d'un fardeau suppose la force active. Dans la contrainte point de vertu, et sans vertu point de religion. Rends-moi esclave, je n'en serai pas meilleur. Le souverain même n'a aucun droit d'employer la contrainte pour amener les hommes à la religion, qui suppose essentiellement choix et liberté. Ma pensée n'est pas plus soumise à l'autorité que la maladie ou la santé."

"Le divorce est probablement de la même date à peu près que le mariage. Je crois pourtant que le mariage est de quelques semaines plus ancien."

"Il faut vingt ans pour mener l'homme de l'état de plante où il est dans le ventre de sa mère, et de l'état de pur animal, qui est le partage de sa première enfance, jusqu'à celui où la maturité de la raison commence à poindre. Il a fallu trente siècles pour connaître un peu sa structure. Il faudrait l'éternité pour connaître quelque chose de son âme. Il ne faut qu'un instant pour le tuer."

"En général, l'art du gouvernement consiste à prendre le plus d'argent qu'on peut à une grande partie des citoyens, pour le donner à une autre partie."

"Rien n'est si ordinaire que d'imiter ses ennemis, et d'employer leurs armes."

"L'Éternel a ses desseins de toute éternité. Si la prière est d'accord avec ses volontés immuables, il est très inutile de lui demander ce qu'il a résolu de faire. Si on le prie de faire le contraire de ce qu'il a résolu, c'est le prier d'être faible, léger, inconstant; c'est croire qu'il soit tel, c'est se moquer de lui. Ou vous lui demandez une chose juste; en ce cas il la doit, et elle se fera sans qu'on l'en prie; c'est même se défier de lui que lui faire instance ou la chose est injuste, et alors on l'outrage. Vous êtes digne ou indigne de la grâce que vous implorez: si digne, il le sait mieux que vous; si indigne, on commet un crime de plus en demandant ce qu'on ne mérite pas. En un mot, nous ne faisons des prières à Dieu que parce que nous l'avons fait à notre image. Nous le traitons comme un bacha, comme un sultan qu'on peut irriter ou apaiser."

"Il est défendu de tuer; tout meurtrier est puni, à moins qu'il n'ait tué en grande compagnie, et au son des trompettes."

"Que les supplices des criminels soient utiles. Un homme pendu n'est bon à rien, et un homme condamné aux ouvrages publics sert encore la patrie, et est une leçon vivante."

"Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde."

"Toutes les sectes des philosophes ont échoué contre l'écueil du mal physique et moral. Il ne reste que d'avouer que Dieu ayant agi pour le mieux n'a pu agir mieux."

"La superstition met le monde entier en flammes; la philosophie les éteint."

"O Truth! pure and sacred virgin, when wilt thou be worthily revered? O Goddess who instructs us, why didst thou put thy palace in a well? When will our learned writers, alike free from bitterness and from flattery, faithfully teach us life?"

"Prejudice is the reason of fools."

"Shun idleness: it is the rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals."

"The Devil and Love are but one."

"All thinkers have about the same principles, and form but one republic."

"Alas! how can we always resist? The devil tempts us, and the flesh is weak."

"Use, do not abuse : neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy."

"Whoever is suspicious incites treason."

"God created woman only to tame man."

"Anything serves as a pretext for the wicked."

"All joys do not cause laughter; great pleasures are serious: pleasures of love do not make us laugh."

"O unfortunates who sin without pleasure! in your errors be more reasonable ; be, at least, fortunate sinners. Since you must be damned, be damned for amiable faults."

"Laws should be clear, uniform, precise : to interpret them is nearly always to corrupt them."

"Pleasure has its time; so, too, has wisdom. Make love in thy youth, and in old age, attend to thy salvation."

"I do not know in the whole history of the world a hero, a worthy man, a prophet, a true Christian, who has not been the victim of the jealous, of a scamp, or of a sinister spirit."

"We never live: we are always in expectation of living."

"A republic is not founded on virtue, but on the ambition of its citizens."

"Heaven made virtue; man, the appearance."

"Dress changes the manners."

"Virtue: a word easy to pronounce, difficult to understand."

"We can not always oblige, but we can always speak obligingly."

"The best written book is a receipt for a pottage."

"Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts."

"Our country is that spot to which our heart is attached."

"It does not depend upon us to avoid poverty, but it does depend upon us to make that poverty respected."

"Labor is often the father of pleasure."

"Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head> the heart, and the senses."

"Superstition excites storms; philosophy appeases them."

"If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one."

"Love is a canvas furnished by Nature, and embroidered by imagination."

"Satire lies about men of letters during their life, and eulogy after their death."

"Moderation is the pleasure of the wise."

"Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: a very stupid daughter of a very wise mother."

"One dies twice: to cease to live is nothing, but to cease to love and to be loved is an insupportable death."

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

"If as much care were taken to perpetuate a race of fine men as is done to prevent the mixture of ignoble blood in horses and dogs, the genealogy of every one would be written on his face and displayed in his manners."

"All the passions die with the years; self-love alone never dies."

"Poetry is the music of the soul."

"O love! only a few rays of thy sacred fire radiate in this exhausted world!"

"All religions are more or less mixed with superstitions. Man is not reasonable enough to content himself with a pure and sensible religion, worthy of the Deity."

"Society depends upon women. The nations who confine them are unsociable."

"The art of praising caused the art of pleasing."

"Philosophers and men of letters have done more for mankind than Orpheus, Hercules, or Theseus; for it is more meritorious and more difficult to wean men from their prejudices than to civilize the barbarian : It is harder to correct than to instruct."

"Laws should never be in contradiction to usages; for, if the usages are good, the laws are valueless."

"Voltaire inscribed on a statue of Love: "Whoever thou art, behold thy master! He rules thee, or has ruled thee, or will rule thee!""

"Why do we dream in our sleep if we have no soul? and, if we have one, how is it that dreams are so incoherent and extravagant?"

"History is only a record of crimes and misfortunes."

"All the reasoning of man is not worth one sentiment of woman."

"With the world, do not resort to injuries, but only to irony and gayety: injury revolts, while irony makes one reflect, and gayety disarms."

"In those countries where the morals are the most dissolute, the language is the most severe; as if they would replace on the lips what has deserted the heart."

"The reasonable worship of a just God who punishes and rewards, would undoubtedly contribute to the happiness of men; but when that salutary knowledge of a just God is disfigured by absurd lies and dangerous superstitions, then the remedy turns to poison."

"This world is but a lottery of goods, of ranks, of dignities, of rights."

"Well! sage Evhemere, what have you seen in all your travels?" "Follies!"

"None have lived without shedding tears."

"It takes twenty years to bring man from the state of embryo, and from that of a mere animal, as he is in his first infancy, to the point when his reason begins to dawn. It has taken thirty centuries to know his structure; it would take eternity to know something of his soul: it takes but an instant to kill him."

"Life is long enough for him who knows how to use it. Working and thinking extend its limits."

"Stupid stoics! you want to change man, and you destroy him!"

"Can we not seek the author of life but in the obscure labyrinth of theology?"

"Self-love is a balloon filled with wind, from which tempests emerge when pricked."

"It is strange that thought should depend upon the stomach, and still that men with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers."

"Jest with life: for that only is it good."

"O God, whom the world misjudges, and whom everything declares! listen to the last words that my lips pronounce! If I have wandered, it was in seeking Thy law. My heart may go astray, but it is full of Thee! I see, without alarm, eternity appear; and I can not think that a God who has given me life, that a God who has poured so many blessings on my days, will, now that my days are done, torment me for ever!"

"L'étymologie est une science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose."

"Les médecins administrent des médicaments dont ils savent très peu, à des malades dont ils savent moins, pour guérir des maladies dont ils ne savent rien."

"I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker."

"L'adjectif est l'ennemi du substantif."

"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."

""There is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night". False quote, misattributed to Voltaire by Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind"

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."

"Business is the salt of life."

"Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it."

"Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies."

"The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere."

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense."

"To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?"

"One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker."

"France is a nation with one religion and many sauces; England is a nation with many religions and only one sauce."

"I grew bored in France -- and the main reason is that everyone here resembles Voltaire."

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire Rousseau; Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again."

"Voltaire, the greatest of "infidels" of the eighteenth century, used to say, that if there were no God, people would have to invent one... Voltaire becomes, toward the end of his life, Pythagorical, and concludes by saying: "I have consumed forty years of my pilgrimage . . . seeking the philosopher's stone called truth. I have consulted all the adepts of antiquity, Epicurus and Augustine, Plato and Malebranche, and I still remain in ignorance. . . . All that I have been able to obtain by comparing and combining the system of Plato, of the tutor of Alexander, Pythagoras, and the Oriental, is this: Chance is a word void of sense. The world is arranged according to mathematical laws." ("Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764")"

"Voltaire, the greatest skeptic of his day, the materialist par excellence, shared Bailly's belief. He thought it quite likely that: Long before the empires of China and India, there had been nations cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state of ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure nature. Lettres sur l'Atlantide, p. 15. This conjecture is but a half-guess. There were such "deluges of barbarians" in the Fifth Race. With regard to the Fourth, it was a bonâ fide deluge of water which swept it away. Neither Voltaire nor Bailly, however, knew anything of the Secret Doctrine of the East. That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly a "question of historical facts.""

"Not a day goes by without our using the word optimism, coined by Voltaire against Leibniz, who had demonstrated (in spite of the Ecclesiastes and with the approval of the Church) that we live in the best of possible worlds. Voltaire, very reasonably, denied that exorbitant opinion... Leibniz could have replied that a world which has given us Voltaire has some right to be considered the best."

"He is by his opinions, and also by his middle-class origin, the natural leader of an implacable opposition."

"Voltaire was the cleverest of all past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he surely was not."

"Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire; he was for his country both Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution. He carried on the antiseptic scepticism of Montaigne, and the healthy earthy humor of Rabelais; he fought superstition and corruption more savagely and effectively than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Knox or Melanchthon; he helped to make the powder with which Mirabeau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre blew up the Old Regime... No, never has a writer had in his lifetime such influence. Despite exile, imprisonment, and the suppression of almost everyone of his books by the minions of church and state, he forged fiercely a path for his truth, until at last kings, popes and emperors catered to him, thrones trembled before him, and half the world listened to catch his every word. It was an age in which many things called for a destroyer. "Laughing lions must come," said Nietzsche; well, Voltaire came, and "annihilated with laughter." He and Rousseau were the two voices of a vast process of economic and political transition from feudal aristocracy to the rule of the middle class...He was happy in his garden, planting fruit trees which he did not expect to see flourish in his lifetime. When an admirer praised the work he had done for posterity he answered, "Yes, I have planted 4000 trees." He rejects all systems, and suspects that "every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack." "The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women." "It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.""

"Likewise, there is much truth in Voltaire's enthusiastic Orientalist assumption that unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Indian and Chinese "religions" were not based on prophetic "revelations" but on a purely human contemplation of reality."

"As he sup'd one night with Mr. Pope at Twickenham he fell into a fit of swearing and blasphemy about his constitution. Old Mrs Pope ask'd him how his constitution came to be so bad at his age: "Oh (says he) those d—d Jesuits, when I was a boy, b—gg—r'd me to such a degree that I shall never get over it as long as I live". ... This was said in English aloud before the servants."

"To name Voltaire is to characterize the whole eighteenth century."

"Jésus a pleuré, Voltaire a souri; c'est de cette larme divine et de ce sourire humain qu'est faite la douceur de la civilisation actuelle."

"Voltaire's keen laughter must be heard before Samson could strike with the headsman's axe. Yet Voltaire's laugh proved nothing ; it produced only a brutal effect, just as did Samson's base axe. Voltaire could only wound the body of Christianity. All his sarcasms derived from ecclesiastical history ; all his witticisms on dogma and worship, on the Bible, that most sacred book of humanity, on the Virgin Mary, that fairest flower of poetry; the whole dictionary of philosophical arrows which he discharged against the clergy and the priesthood, could only wound the mortal body of Christianity, but were powerless against its interior essence, its deeper spirit, its immortal soul."

"By excluding the intolerants from the scope of tolerance, Voltaire reduced tolerance to an empty box. Worse, he prepared the atrocities of the Terror of the French Revolution, which was in turn the model of Communist terror. Millions were killed by proclaiming they had no right to tolerance because they were themselves intolerant. …The dramatic mistake of Voltaire should be corrected by proclaiming that religions and philosophies have [the] right to be in different ways intolerant, and should still be tolerated."

"I must give you a piece of intelligence that you perhaps already know—namely, that the ungodly arch-villain Voltaire has died miserably like a dog—just like a brute. That is his reward!"

"O Voltaire! O humaneness! O nonsense! There is something about "truth", about the search for truth; and when a human being is too human about it- "il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"- I bet he finds nothing."

"There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote."

"People like Voltaire or Euripides are no one's idea of profound thinkers, and yet, in scarcely more than a generation, the immortal gods succumb to their attacks as meekly as dew to the sun."

"Contrary to Voltaire's sarcasm, the Creator does not resemble his creature."

"Of no writer can it be said with greater truth that the half is greater than the whole. His histories may still be studied as models of balanced and lucid narrative. His letters hold an honoured place even among the greatest. Above all, his fame rests securely upon his two stories, Zadig and Candide, those little masterpieces of swift irony and crystal-clear criticism which, in a hundred and fifty years, have lost not one spark of their brilliance, and which will perish only with the death of the French tongue. If we might give to Voltaire and Diderot two books apiece, and exclude the erudition which was their pride, they would stand unchallenged in their century. Candide and Zadig are still supreme, and what but they are worthy to be set on the same shelf with the Neveu de Rameau and the Paradoxe?"

"From Kapila, the Hindu philosopher, who many centuries before Christ demurred to the claim of the mystic Yogins, that in ecstasy a man has the power of seeing Deity face to face and conversing with the " highest" beings, down to the Voltaireans of the eighteenth century, who laughed at everything that was held sacred by other people, each age had its unbelieving Thomases. p. 121"

"In the midst of this American society, so well policed, so sententious, so charitable, a cold selfishness and complete insensibility prevails when it is a question of the natives of the country. The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at the bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilised; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death. Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another."

"Men sometimes submit to shame, to tyranny, to conquest, but they never long suffer anarchy. There is no people so barbarous that they escape this general law of humanity"

"Born under another sky, placed in the middle of an always-moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which sweeps along everything that surrounds him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything; he grows accustomed to naught but change, and concludes by viewing it as the natural state of man; he feels a need for it; even more, he loves it: for instability, instead of occurring to him in the form of disasters, seems to give birth to nothing around him but wonders..."

"As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"

"The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections."

"So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me."

"The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction."

"The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing."

"Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle."

"The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through."

"I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property."

"There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom."

"Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power."

"The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on."

""The will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age."

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it."

"With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs."

"The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights."

"Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts."

"Pour recueillir les biens inestimables qu'assure la liberté de la presse, il faut savoir se soumettre aux maux inévitables qu'elle fait naître."

"The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people."

"In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies."

"A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."

"In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law."

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

"The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own."

"In the United States, except for slaves, servants and the destitute fed by townships, everyone has the vote and this is an indirect contributor to law-making. Anyone wishing to attack the law is thus reduced to adopting one of two obvious courses: they must either change the nation's opinion or trample its wishes under foot."

"An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing."

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."

"In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them."

"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."

"Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people."

"In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. Cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention."

"If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same. Society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of very little importance to its interests."

"The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live."

"Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?"

"They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point."

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

"Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian."

"The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact."

"You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European. Nor is this all we scarcely acknowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom slavery has brought among us. His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes."

"No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do."

"I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies."

"The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle."

"Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor."

"There are at the present time two great nations in the world—allude to the Russians and the Americans— All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding—along a path to which no limit can be perceived."

"The President ... may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war."

"In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness."

"He was as great as a man can be without morality."

"Men in general are neither very good nor very bad, but mediocre... Man with his vices, his weaknesses, his virtues, this confused medley of good and ill, high and low, goodness and depravity, is yet, take him all in all, the object on earth most worthy of study, of interest, of pity, of attachment and of admiration. And since we haven't got angels, we can attach ourselves to nothing greater and more worthy of our devotion than our own kind."

"Around us knowledge has been extinguished, and recruitment of men of religion and men of law has ceased; that is to say, we have made Muslim society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbarous than it had been before knowing us."

"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself."

"We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon."

"They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom."

"As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways."

"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

"The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence."

"In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own."

"General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect."

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

"The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality."

"I once met an American sailor and asked him why his country's ships are made so that they will not last long. He answered offhand that the art of navigation was making such quick progress that even the best of boats would be almost useless if it lasted more than a few years."

"There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin."

"They certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard."

"By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste."

"The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express."

"There is hardly a member of Congress who can make up his mind to go home without having despatched at least one speech to his constituents; nor who will endure any interruption until he has introduced into his harangue whatever useful suggestions may be made touching the four-and-twenty States of which the Union is composed, and especially the district which he represents."

"The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies."

"I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery."

"Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart."

"Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations... In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others."

"Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association. I have come across several types of association in America of which, I confess, I had not previously the slightest conception, and I have often admired the extreme skill they show in proposing a common object for the exertions of very many and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it."

"I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause."

"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits."

"Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,… They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. ... Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it."

"The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation."

"What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them."

"What most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones."

"The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their distresses. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public."

"In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested, but they are gentle."

"It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap."

"In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister."

"The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth."

"Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse."

"In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same."

"I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women."

"Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners."

"It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too."

"Commerce is naturally adverse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. It is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme measures until obliged by the most absolute necessity. Commerce renders men independent of each other, gives them a lofty notion of their personal importance, leads them to seek to conduct their own affairs, and teaches how to conduct them well; it therefore prepares men for freedom, but preserves them from revolutions."

"Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort."

"In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned."

"If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto."

"Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved."

"When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest."

"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all."

"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult—to begin a war and to end it."

"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country."

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."

"Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details."

"The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle."

"They (the emperors) frequently abused their power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; .. But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them."

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

"I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it."

"As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity."

"Égalité is an expression of envy. It means, in the real heart of every Republican, " No one shall be better off than I am;" and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible."

"It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable."

"Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country."

"The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt."

"In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end."

"I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived."

"For the first time in sixty years, the priests, the old aristocracy and the people met in a common sentiment—a feeling of revenge, it is true, and not of affection; but even that is a great thing in politics, where a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships."

"Alternative translation: In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships."

"History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals."

"The French are … the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation of Europe, and the one that is surest to inspire admiration, hatred, terror, or pity, but never indifference."

"He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave."

"The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform."

"America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

"In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. In the fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there. In her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits, aflame with righteousness, did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle."

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

"In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve."

"A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office."

"Tocqueville was a Liberal of the purest breed—a Liberal and nothing else, deeply suspicious of democracy and its kindred, equality, centralisation and utilitarianism. Of all writers he is the most widely acceptable, and the hardest to find fault with. He is always wise, always right, and as just as Aristides. His intellect is without a flaw, but it is limited and constrained. He knows political literature and history less well than political life; his originality is not creative, and he does not stimulate with gleams of new light or unfathomed suggestiveness."

"In his discussion of the "laws and mores" of the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville was frank in acknowledging the racialized parameters of Jacksonian democracy. Describing the United States as an "Anglo-American confederation," Tocqueville characterized Black and Indigenous people as "tangents to my subjects, being American, but not democratic." Yet despite his assertion in the first volume that these "three races" defined the American project, by the time he was writing the second volume, Tocqueville was already acknowledging that other nonwhite populations beyond "Indians and Negroes" were part of the United States. One of these groups was Mexicans. Interestingly-as the epigraph to this chapter shows-in prognosticating about this "new" population, Tocqueville's account simultaneously recognizes and disappears them. This practice of acknowledgment and erasure would become a familiar part of the Anglo racial imaginary-particularly when addressing the Mexican presence in the United States."

"Democracy in America has lived by its moral dignity, its acuteness, its wisdom, its style."

"Alexis de Tocqueville published his Democracy in America, one of the few treatises on the philosophy of politics which has risen to the rank of a classic... It is a classic, and because it is a classic one may venture to canvas it freely, without the fear of seeming to detract from the fame of its author. The more one reads Tocqueville, the more admiration does one feel for his acuteness, for the delicacy of his analysis, for the elegant precision of his reasonings, for the limpid purity of his style; above all for his love of truth and the elevation of his views. He is not only urbane, but judicial; not only noble, but edifying. There is perhaps no book of the generation to which he belonged which contains more solid wisdom in a more attractive dress."

"let us not forget that the consensus of opinion among eminent European scholars who know the race problem in America from De Tocqueville down to Von Halle, De Laveleys, Archer and Johnston, is that it forms the gravest of American problems."

"Cases have been constantly recorded [in the United States]...where the expression of some unwelcome doctrine, even in private, has been visited with fierce retribution under the elastic penal code of Judge Lynch... M. de Tocqueville, whose bias if anything was in favour of democracy, and whose writings have always been signalised for judicial impartiality, speaks as strongly upon this subject as the bitterest caricaturist could have spoken... We recommend the whole of De Tocqueville's chapter, ‘De l'Omnipotence de la Majorite,’ to the reperusal of those who would trace those troubles to their true source."

"De Tocqueville was the Burke of his age, and his treatise upon America may well be regarded as among the best books hitherto produced for the political student of all times and countries."

"Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most thoughtful historians of [the French Revolution], notes that the French monarchy sowed the seeds of its own demise by destroying the regional parliaments, institutions that the French thought were just as ancient and just as unchangeable as the monarchy itself. After the king dispersed the parliaments both in Paris and in the regions, the French people concluded that everything, including a more democratic system, was possible. Something similar, [Abbas] Gallyamov argues, is now possible in Russia today."

"M. de Tocqueville—a small and delicate-looking young man and a most engaging person. Full of intelligence and knowledge, free from boasting and self-sufficiency—of gentle manners, and handsome countenance. In conversing he displays a candid and unprejudiced mind—about thirty-two years of age, of a noble race in Normandy, and unmarried."

"Nobody saw more clearly than de Tocqueville that democracy as an essentially individualist institution stood in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism."

"It is the burden of the argument of Tocqueville's great work, Democracy in America, that democracy is the only effective method of educating the majority... This seems also to explain the puzzling contrast between Tocqueville's persistent faultfinding with democracy on almost all particular points and the emphatic acceptance of the principle which is so characteristic of his work."

"[O]f a definite liberal movement one can speak only after the Restoration. In France it reached its height during the July Monarchy (1830–48) ... Their programme, known as 'guarantism', was essentially a doctrine of constitutional limitations of government... To this tradition, largely deriving from Britain, also belonged the perhaps most important French liberal thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville."

"Who does not know Tocqueville cannot understand liberalism. A case of unanswerable power could, I think, be made out for the view that he and Lord Acton were the essential liberals of the nineteenth century."

"In that remarkable work [Democracy in America], the excellences of democracy were pointed out in a more conclusive, because a more specific manner than I had ever known them to be, even by the most enthusiastic democrats; while the specific dangers which beset democracy, considered as the government of the numerical majority, were brought into equally strong light, and subjected to a masterly analysis, not as reasons for resisting what the author considered as an inevitable result of human progress, but as indications of the weak points of popular government, the defences by which it needs to be guarded, and the correctives which must be added to it in order that while full play is given to its beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different nature may be neutralized or mitigated."

"A collateral subject on which also I derived great benefit from the study of Tocqueville, was the fundamental question of centralization. The powerful philosophic analysis which he applied to American and to French experience, led him to attach the utmost importance to the performance of as much of the collective business of society, as can safely be so performed, by the people themselves, without any intervention of the executive government, either to supersede their agency, or to dictate the manner of its exercise. He viewed this practical political activity of the individual citizen, not only as one of the most effectual means of training the social feelings and practical intelligence of the people, so important in themselves and so indispensable to good government, but also as the specific counteractive to some of the characteristic infirmities of democracy, and a necessary protection against its degenerating into the only despotism of which, in the modern world, there is real danger—the absolute rule of the head of the executive over a congregation of isolated individuals, all equals but all slaves."

"Who was it that said of him that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat? That is, he knew democracy to be the conqueror, but he doubted how far it would be an improvement, he saw its perils, etc."

"One of his Cavour] favourite authors was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose study of democracy in the United States he on one occasion called the most remarkable book of modern times; here, in his opinion, was the most likely pointer to the direction that the world was about to take: a book full of hope but also a warning."

"The main stream which has borne European society towards Socialism during the past 100 years is the irresistible progress of Democracy. De Tocqueville drove and hammered this truth into the reluctant ears of the Old World two generations ago; and we have all pretended to carry it about as part of our mental furniture ever since. But like most epigrammatic commonplaces, it is not generally realized; and De Tocqueville's book has, in due course, become a classic which everyone quotes and nobody reads."

"We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another."

"[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us."

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write."

"Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else."

"Quand j’étudie les mécanismes de pouvoir, j’essaie d’étudier leur spécificité… Je n’admets ni la notion de maîtrise ni l’universalité de la loi. Au contraire, je m’attache à saisir des mécanismes d’exercise effectif de pouvoir ; et je le fais parce que ceux qui sont insérés dans ces relations de pouvoir, qui y sont impliqués peuvent, dans leurs actions, dans leur résistance et leur rébellion, leur échapper, les transformer, bref, ne plus être soumis. Et si je ne dis pas ce qu’il faut faire, ce n’est pas parce que je crois qu’il n’y a rien à faire. Bien au contraire, je pense qu’il y a mille choses à faire, à inventer, à forger par ceux qui, reconnaissant les relations de pouvoir dans lesquelles ils sont impliqués, ont décidé de leur résister ou de leur échapper. De ce point de vue, toute ma recherche repose sur un postulat d’optimisme absolu. Je n’effectue pas mes analyses pour dire : voilà comment sont les choses, vous êtes piégés. Je ne dis ces choses que dans la mesure où je considère que cela permet de les transformer. Tout ce que je fais, je le fais pour que cela serve."

"Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I'm a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I use: I try to figure out what's at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that's not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse."

"The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but, rather, to use one's sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals."

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being."

"I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist."

"When I was a student in the 1950s, I read Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window. Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger. Being and Time is difficult, but the more recent works are clearer. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that."

"Qui définit le moment où j'écris?"

"Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to "uncover" their "own identity," and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is "Does this thing conform to my identity?" then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule."

"One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning."

"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think."

"There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals."

"What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body — through the eroticization of the body. I think it's ... a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure."

"There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know yourself.” In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle."

"A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest."

"My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is danger­ous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apa­thy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger."

"Je crois que le pouvoir politique s’exerce encore, s’exerce en outre, de plus, par l’intermédiaire d’un certain nombre d’institutions qui ont l’air comme ça de n’avoir rien de commun avec le pouvoir politique, qui ont l’air d’en être indépendantes et qui ne le sont pas."

"Il me semble que la tache politique actuelle dans une société comme la notre c’est de critiquer le jeu des institutions apparemment les plus neutres et les plus indépendantes, de les critiquer et les attaquer de telle manière que la violence politique qui s’exerçait obscurément en elles (les institutions) surgissent et qu’on puisse lutter contre elles."

"The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made."

"The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence."

"But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?"

"In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness."

"At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion."

"Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness."

"Water and navigation had that role to play. Locked in the ship from which he could not escape, the madman was handed over to the thousand-armed river, to the sea where all paths cross, and the great uncertainty that surrounds all things. A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom, on the most open road of all, chained solidly to the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence, the prisoner of the passage. It is not known where he will land, and when he lands, he knows not whence he came. His truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own. [...] One thing is certain: the link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man."

"From the knowledge of that fatal necessity that reduces man to dust we pass to a contemptuous contemplation of the nothingness that is life itself. The fear before the absolute limit of death becomes interiorised in a continual process of ironisation. Fear was disarmed in advance, made derisory by being tamed and rendered banal, and constantly paraded in the spectacle of life. Suddenly, it was there to be discerned in the mannerisms, failings and vices of normal people. Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells. The death's head showed itself to be a vessel already empty, for madness was the being-already-there of death. Death's conquered presence, sketched out in these everyday signs, showed not only that its reign had already begun, but also that its prize was a meagre one. Death unmasked the mask of life, and nothing more: to show the skull beneath the skin it had no need to remove beauty or truth, but merely to remove the plaster or the tawdry clothes. The carnival mask and the cadaver share the same fixed smile. But the laugh of madness is an anticipation of the rictus grin of death, and the fool, that harbinger of the macabre, draws death's sting."

"Meaning created links so numerous, so rich and involved that only esoteric knowledge could possibly have the necessary key. Objects became so weighed down with attributes, connections and associations that they lost their own original face. Meaning was no longer read in an immediate perception, and accordingly objects ceased to speak directly: between the knowledge that animated the figures of objects and the forms they were transformed into, a divide began to appear, opening the way for a symbolism more often associated with the world of dreams."

"In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum."

"There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it everywhere, an integral element of each experience, both in images and in real life dangers. During the classical period, it was also on public view, but behind bars. When it manifested itself it was at a carefully controlled distance, under the watchful eye of a reason that denied all kinship with it, and felt quite unthreatened by any hint of resemblance. Madness had become a thing to be observed, no longer the monster within, but an animal moved by strange mechanisms, more beast than man, where all humanity had long since disappeared."

"If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled."

"To say that madness is dazzlement is to say that the madman sees the day, the same day that rational men see, as both live in the same light, but that when looking at that very light, nothing else and nothing in it, he sees it as nothing but emptiness, night and nothingness. Darkness for him is another way of seeing the day. Which means that in looking at the night and the nothingness of the night, he does not see at all. And that in the belief that he sees, he allows the fantasies of his imagination and the people of his nights to come to him as realities. For that reason, delirium and dazzlement exist in a relation that is the essence of madness, just as truth and clarity, in their fundamental relation, are constitutive of classical reason. In that sense, the Cartesian progression of doubt is clearly the great exorcism of madness. Descartes closes his eyes and ears the better to see the true light of the essential day, thereby ensuring that he will not suffer the dazzlement of the mad, who open their eyes and only see night, and not seeing at all, believe that they see things when they imagine them. In the uniform clarity of his closed senses, Descartes has broken with all possible fascination, and if he sees, he knows he really sees what he is seeing. Whereas in the madman's gaze, drunk on the light that is night, images rise up and multiply, beyond any possible self-criticism, since the madman sees them, but irremediably separated from being, since the madman sees nothing. Unreason is to reason as dazzlement is to daylight."

"The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature. This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow."

"It is understandable then that tragic heroes, unlike the baroque characters who had preceded them, could never be mad, and that inversely madness could never take on the tragic value we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical epoch, tragic characters and the mad face each other without any possible dialogue or common language, for the one can only pronounce the decisive language of being, where the truth of light and the depths of night meet in a flash, and the other repeats endlessly an indifferent murmur where the empty chatter of the day is cancelled out by the deceptive lies of the shadows."

"This is the moment when it becomes clear that the images of madness are nothing but dream and error, and that if the unfortunate sufferer who is blinded by them invokes them, it is the better to disappear with them into the annihilation for which they are destined."

"In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness."

"To sum up all these steps, each of which is very lengthy and complex, we will have put the game of truth back in the network of constraints and dominations. Truth, I should say rather, the system of truth and falsity, will have revealed the face it turned away from us for so long and which is that of its violence."

"There is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know, the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse the desire to know, which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men desire to know. Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world?"

"Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled."

"In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however - those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts - are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery to age old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness. But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well defined regularity."

"Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up."

"Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume."

"The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange."

"We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lusterless back. The other side of a psyche."

"[L]'âme, prison du corps."

"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"

"It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes."

"The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself."

"It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality."

"Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64,every crime and even every offense now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guily, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization Today the judge- magistrate or juror0 certainly does more than 'judge'"

"The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body."

"A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penalty."

"This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity."

"The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment."

"The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested."

"We must first rid ourselves of the illusion that penality is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime and that, in this role, according to the social forms, the political systems or beliefs, it may be severe or lenient, tend towards expiation of obtaining redress, towards the pursuit of individuals or the attribution of collective responsibility. We must analyse rather the ‘concrete systems of punishment’, study them as social phenomena that cannot be accounted for by the juridical structure of society alone, nor by its fundamental ethical choices; we must situate them in their field of operation, in which the punishment of crime is not the sole element; we must show that punitive measures are not simply ‘negative’ mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support (and, in this sense,although legal punishment is carried out in order to punish offences, one might say that the definition of offences and their prosecution are carried out in turn in order to maintain the punitive mechanisms and their functions)."

"The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength."

"There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king's desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system."

"If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal."

"In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance."

"Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it."

"The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extend of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. The proclamation of these crimes blew up to epic proportions the tiny struggle that passed unperceived in everyday life. If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint."

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

"This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign."

"It proved necessary, therefore, to control these illicit practices and introduce new legislation to cover them. The offenses had to be properly defined and more surely punished; out of this mass of irregularities, sometimes tolerated and sometimes punished with a severity out of all proportion to the offense, one had to determine what was an intolerable offense, and the offenders had to be apprehended and punished. With the new forms of capital accumulation, new relations of production and the new legal status of property, all the popular practices that belonged, either in a silent, everyday, tolerated form, or in a violent form, to the illegality of rights were reduced by force to an illegality of property. In that movement which transformed a society of juridico-political levies into a society of the appropriation of the means and products of labour, theft tended to become the first of the great loopholes in legality. Or, to put it another way, the economy of illegalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society. The illegality of property was separated from the illegality of rights. This distinction represents a class opposition because, on the one hand, the illegality that was to be most accessible to the lower classes was that of property – the violent transfer of ownership – and because, on the other, the bourgeoisie was to reserve to itself the illegality of rights: the possibility of getting round its own regulations and its own laws, of ensuring for itself an immense sector of economic circulation by a skillful manipulation of gaps in the law – gaps that were foreseen by its silences, or opened up by de facto tolerance. And this great redistribution of illegalities was even to be expressed through a specialization of the legal circuits: for illegalities of property – for theft – there were the ordinary courts and punishments; for the illegalities of rights – fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial operations – special legal institutions applied with transactions, accommodations, reduced fines, etc. The bourgeoisie reserved to itself the fruitful domain of the illegality of rights. And at the same time as this split was taking place, there emerged the need for a constant policing concerned essentially with this illegality of property. It became necessary to get rid of the old economy of the power to punish, based on the principles of the confused and inadequate multiplicity of authorities, the distribution and concentration of the power correlative with actual inertia and inevitable tolerance, punishments that were spectacular in their manifestations and haphazard in their application. It became necessary to define a strategy and techniques of punishment in which an economy of continuity and permanence would replace that of expenditure and excess. In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities."

"Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, 'leniency', as a calculated economy of the powder to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular branding in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and sings circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by this term: the correlative of a technique of power. Old 'anatomies' of punishment are abandoned, But have we really entered the age of non-corporal punishment?"

"In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation."

"This legible lesson, this ritual recording, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony. The duration that makes the punishment effective for the guilty is also useful for the spectators. They must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. A secret punishment is a punishment half wasted. Children should be allowed to come to the places where the penalty is being carried out; there they will attend their classes in civics. And grown men will periodically relearn the laws. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays."

"This, then, is how one must imagine the punitive city. At the crossroads, in the gardens, at the side of roads being repaired or bridges built, in workshops open to all, in the depths of mines that may be visited, will be hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment. Each crime will have its law; each criminal his punishment. It will be a visible punishment, a punishment that tells all, that explains, justifies itself, convicts: placards, different-coloured caps bearing inscriptions, posters, symbols, texts read or printed, tirelessly repeat the code. Scenery, perspectives, optical effects, trompe-l'œil sometimes magnify the scene, making it more fearful than it is, but also clearer. From where the public is sitting, it is possible to believe in the existence of certain cruelties which, in fact, do not take place. But the essential point, in all these real or magnified severities, is that they should all, according to a strict economy, teach a lesson: that each punishment should be a fable. And that, in counterpoint with all the direct examples of virtue, one may at each moment encounter, as a living spectacle, the misfortunes of vice. Around each of these moral ‘representations’, schoolchildren will gather with their masters and adults will learn what lessons to teach their offspring. The great terrifying ritual of the public execution gives way, day after day, street after street, to this serious theatre, with its multifarious and persuasive scenes. And popular memory will reproduce in rumour the austere discourse of the law. But perhaps it will be necessary, above these innumerable spectacles and narratives, to place the major sign of punishment for the most terrible of crimes: the keystone of the penal edifice."

"Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide."

"A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus."

"The chief function of the disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them"

"The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single haze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned."

"We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without."

"A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations"

"Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized' how he is to be recognized' how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in a individual way, etc.)."

"The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."

"There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations"

"But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."

"But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement ... There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system"

"The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."

"The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements."

"Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy."

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection."

"In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king."

"Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual...It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification."

"Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems."

"Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species."

"The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal."

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

"L’important, c’est que le sexe n’ait pas été seulement affaire de sensation et de plaisir, de loi ou d’interdiction, mais aussi de vrai et de faux."

"The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified."

"Les discours sont des éléments ou des blocs tactiques dans le champ des rapports de force; il peut y en avoir de différents et même de contradictoires à l'intérieur d'une même stratégie; ils peuvent au contraire circuler sans changer de forme entre des stratégies opposées."

"Par pouvoir… je n’entends pas un système général de domination exercée par un élément ou un groupe sur un autre, et dont les effets, par dérivations successives, traversaient le corps social tout entier… il me semble qu’il faut comprendre d’abord la multiplicité de rapports de force qui sont immanents au domaine où ils s’exercent, et sont constitutifs de leur organisation ; le jeu qui par voie de luttes et d’affrontements incessants les transforme, les renforce, les inverse ; les appuis que ces rapports de force trouvent les uns dans les autres, de manière à former chaîne ou système, ou, au contraire, les décalages, les contradictions qui les isolent les uns des autres ; les stratégies enfin dans lesquelles ils prennent effet, et dont le dessin général ou la cristallisation institutionnelle prennent corps dans les appareils étatiques, dans la formulation de la loi, dans les hégémonies sociales. La condition de possibilité du pouvoir… il ne fait pas la chercher dans l’existence première d’un point central, dans un foyer unique de souveraineté d’où rayonneraient des formes dérivées et descendantes ; induisent sans cesse, par leur inégalité, des états de pouvoir, mais toujours locaux et instables. Omniprésence du pouvoir : non point parce qu’il aurait le privilège de tout regrouper sous son invincible unité, mais parce qu’il se produit à chaque instant, en tout point, ou plutôt dans toute relation d’un point à un autre. Le pouvoir est partout ; ce n’est pas qu’il englobe tout, c’est qu’il vient de partout."

"Il y a des moments dans la vie où la question de savoir si on peut penser autrement qu’on ne pense et percevoir autrement qu’on ne voit est indispensable pour continuer à regarder ou à réfléchir… Qu’est-ce donc que la philosophie aujourd’hui… si elle ne consiste pas, au lieu de légitimer ce qu’on sait déjà, à entreprendre de savoir comment et jusqu’où il serait possible de penser autrement ?… L’ « essai »—qu’il faut entendre comme épreuve modificatrice de soi-même dans le jeu de la vérité et non comme appropriation simplificatrice d’autrui à des fins de communication—est le corps vivant de la philosophie, si du moins celle-ci est encore maintenant ce qu’elle était autrefois, c’est-à-dire une « ascèse », un exercice de soi, dans la pensée."

"The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them."

"The question here is the same as the question I addressed with regard to madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality. In all of these cases, it was not a question of showing how these objects were for a long time hidden before being finally discovered, nor of showing how all these objects are only wicked illusions or ideological products to be dispelled in the light of reason finally having reached its zenith. It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices—from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth—was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, etcetera), nonetheless become something."

"Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment ... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. ... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance."

"The new governmental reason does not deal with what I would call the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals, things, wealth, and land. It no longer deals with these things in themselves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals. ... In the new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the value of things?"

"The pastorate was formed against a sort of intoxication of religious behavior, examples of which are found throughout the Middle East in the second, third, and fourth centuries, and to which certain Gnostic sects in particular bear striking and indisputable testimony. In at least some of these Gnostic sects, in fact, the identification of matter with evil, and as absolute evil, obviously entailed certain consequences. This might be, for example, a kind of vertigo or enchantment provoked by a sort of unlimited asceticism that could lead to suicide: freeing oneself from matter as quickly as possible. There is also the idea, the theme, of destroying matter through the exhaustion of the evils it contains, of committing every possible sin, going to the very end of the domain of evil opened up by matter, and thus destroying matter. Let us sin, then, and sin to infinity. There is also the theme of the nullification of the world of the law, to destroy which one must first destroy the law, that is to say, break every law. One must respond to every law established by the world, or by the powers of the world, by violating it, systematically breaking the law and in effect, overthrowing the reign of the one who created the world."

"All these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is."

"All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book—all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity."

"Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are."

"The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries."

"I don't really know what they mean by "intellectuals," all the people who describe, denounce, or scold them. I do know, on the other hand, what I have committed myself to, as an intellectual, which is to say, after all, a cerebro-spinal individual: to having a brain as supple as possible and a spinal column that's as straight as necessary."

"My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth telling... [W]ho is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power. ...[W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the 'critical' tradition in the West."

"Parrhesia is ordinarily translated into English by "free speech"... the parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhesia, i.e., the one who speaks the truth."

"[I]n parrhesia, the speaker makes it... clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion... by avoiding... rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks. ...[T]he parrhesiastes uses the most direct words and... expression. Whereas rhetoric provides ...technical devices to help ...prevail upon ...minds ...(regardless of the rhetorician's... opinion...)"

"[T]he commitment... in parrhesia is linked to... a difference of status between the speaker and his audience... the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk..."

"The second characteristic of parrhesia... there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth."

"In the Greek conception of parrhesia... truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of... moral qualities... required... to know... and... convey such truth..."

"If there is a kind of "proof" of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage... [Saying] something dangerous—different from what the majority believes—is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes."

"[R]ecognizing someone as a parrhesiastes... was... important... in Greco-Roman society, and... was explicitly raised and discussed by Plutarch, Galen, and others."

"[W]hen a philosopher addresses himself to... a , and tells him... tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks... [and] believes he is speaking the truth, and... takes a risk... [T]hat was Plato's situation with Dionysius in Syracuse... reference... Plato's Seventh Letter, and... The Life of Dion by Plutarch."

"Parrhesia... in its extreme form... takes place in the "game" of life or death. ...[Y]ou risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where... truth goes unspoken. ...[H]e prefers himself as... truth-teller rather than... living... false to himself"

"Parrhesia is... always a "game" between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor."

"[T]he function of parrhesia... has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker..."

"The parrhesia comes from "below,"... and is directed... "above." ...[A]n ancient Greek would not say ...a teacher or father who criticizes a child uses parrhesia."

"[W]hen a philosopher criticizes a ... a citizen criticizes the majority... a pupil criticizes his teacher... such speakers may be using parrhesia."

"The last characteristic of parrhesia... telling the truth is regarded as a duty."

"In parrhesia the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of and moral apathy... in most of the Greek texts... from the Fifth Century B.C. to the Fifth Century A.D."

"[I]n Euripides' plays and... in the texts of the Fourth Century B.C., parrhesia is an essential characteristic of ."

"A sovereign shows himself to be a if he disregards his honest advisors, or punishes them for what they have said."

"In... Plato, Socrates appears in the role of the perrhesiastes."

"[The play] Ion is... devoted to the problem of parrhesia... [I]t pursues the question; who has the right, the duty, and the courage to speak the truth?"

"[[Power|[P]ower]] without limitation is directly related to madness. The man who exercises power is wise only insofar as there exists someone who can use parrhesia to criticize him, thereby putting some limit to his power, to his command."

"[W]e see..., a connection between the lack of parrhesia and slavery. For if you cannot speak freely... then you are enslaved."

"Ion explains that in a democracy there are three categories of citizens: ...(1) citizens who have neither power nor wealth, and who hate all who are superior ...; (2) ...good Athenians ...capable of exercising power, but because they are wise ...keep silent ... and do not worry about ...political affairs ...(3) ...reputable men who are powerful, and use their discourse and reason to participate ...[T]he first group ...will hate him; the second ...will laugh at the young man who wishes to be regarded as one of the First Citizens of Athens; and the ...politicians, will be jealous ...and will try to get rid of him."

"Ion is... a parrhesiastes, i.e., the sort... so valuable to democracy or monarchy since he is courageous enough to explain either to the demos or to the king just what the short-comings of their life really are."

"[A]thuroglossos is characterized by..: (1) When you have "a mouth like a running spring," you cannot distinguish those occasions when you should speak from those when you should remain silent; or that which must be said from that which must remain unsaid; or the circumstances and situations where speech is required from those where one ought to remain silent. (2) As Plutarch notes... you have no regard for the value of logos, for rational discourse as a means of gaining access to truth."

"[I]t is a sign of wisdom to be able to use parrhesia without falling into the garrulousness of athuroglossos... One of the problems... how to distinguish that which must be said from that which should be kept silent."

"In... "The Education of Children"... Plutarch gives an anecdote of Theocritus, a sophist, as an example of athuroglossos... he is... "a giant in impudence"... strong not because of his reason, or his rhetorical ability... or his ability to pronounce the truth, but only because he is arrogant. ...His fourth trait is... "putting his confidence in bluster." He is confident in thorubos... the noise made by a strong voice, by a scream, a clamor, or uproar. ...The final characteristic ...his confidence in ..."ignorant outspokenness..." ... it lacks mathesis ...—learning or wisdom."

"In order for parrhesia to have positive political effects, it must... be linked to a good education, to intellectual and moral formation, to paideia or mathesis."

"The problem... Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and... everyone is equal in front of the law. Such a constitution... is condemned to give equal place to all forms of parrhesia, even the worst. Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead... into tyranny, or... otherwise endanger the city. Hence parrhesia may be dangerous for democracy itself."

"[M]ost of the texts... preserved from this period come from writers... either... affiliated with the aristocratic party, or... distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions."

"This aristocratic thesis is... [t]he demos, the people, are the most numerous... also comprised of the most ordinary, and... even the worst, citizens. Therefore... what is best for the demos cannot be what is best for the polis... the city."

"[In] "On the Peace"... in 355 B.C., Isocrates... [argues that] depraved orators ["flatterers"]... only say what the people desire to hear. ... The honest orator... is courageous enough, to oppose the demos. He has a critical and pedagogical role... to transform the will of the citizens so that they will serve the best interests of the city. ...[O]pposition between the people's will and the city's best interests is fundamental to Isocrates' criticism of the democratic institutions of Athens. ...[H]e concludes ...it is not ...possible to be heard in Athens if one does not parrot the demos' will ...the only ...speakers left who have an audience are "reckless orators" and "comic poets" ..."

"[F]rom Plato's Republic... [t]he primary danger of liberty and free speech in a democracy is what results when everyone has his own... style of life... For then there can be no common logos, no possible unity, for the city."

"In Plato... or Xenophon... we never see Socrates requiring... examination of conscience or... confession of sins. [A]n account of your life, your bios, is... not to give... the historical events... but... to demonstrate whether you are able to show... a relation between the rational discourse, the ', you... use, and the way... you live. Socrates is inquiring into the way that logos gives form to a person's style of life... whether there is a harmonic relation between the two... the degree of accord between a person's life and its principle of intelligibility or logos... [and] the true nature of the relation between the logos and bios"

"The harmony between word and deed in Socrates' life is Dorian... manifested in the courage he showed at Delium. This harmonic accord... distinguishes Socrates from a sophist... [who] can give... fine and beautiful discourses on courage, but is not courageous... [U]nlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords... with what he thinks... [which] accords... with what he does."

"The aim of this Socratic parrhesiastic activity... is to lead the interlocutor to the choice of that kind of life (bios) that will be in Dorian-harmonic accord with, logos, virtue, courage, and truth."

"Foucault has a very good discussion of what the theory of crime—modern economic theory of crime and punishment—has to say. I didn't have much to disagree with him. I think he was accurate on what it has to say. He goes also into a theory of formation of laws, which I had a lot of sympathy with as well."

"The hope may be entertained that some practitioner of the "sociology of knowledge" will one day have an interesting story to tell about -why the work of Michel Foucault generated such wide enthusiasm among certain intellectual elites for several decades in the latter half of the twentieth century. One or two hypotheses of my own may be hazarded. What is interesting about Foucault's unique rhetoric is that he steadfastly resists pronouncing explicit moral-political judgments, yet of course he is judging all the time. Foucault refuses to come clean on his normative commitments, but rather "insinuates" them throughout his work. This constitutes a kind of radical-left positivism that is somehow potently attractive to what I will call the hyper-liberal ethos of late modernity. The idea here is that one must avoid at all costs spelling out a normative vision, since it would ineluctably become the ground for a repressive regime of "normalization." This is clearly connected to the negativism one associates with postmodern writers."

"At a crucial moment in my own work, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to take heart from the humbling serenity and unaffected craftsmanship of Michel Foucault, in what I was not to know were his last years."

"A profound shaking had happened in the seemingly smooth greensward of the classical philosophical tradition... faultlines in the ancient world that one had barely dreamed of ... A manuscript that moved me deeply."

"And now his own history has been written. What does one learn from these books? Chiefly that Foucault's relativistic outlook can be applied to Foucault himself. He used to say that the 19th century was to Marxism what water is to a fish. Increasingly his own work makes sense only when seen as a product of the Sixties. Not that Foucault would have denied this. He never suggested that he wasn't an interested being too. But one should ask of a body of philosophical work that it has a longer shelf life than a couple of decades. Nine years after his death his achievements, such as they are, are so much historical jetsam, their final worth little more than sweet Foucault."

"I wanted to read Mark Twain and Emerson and Thoreau, and I remember moments in class where I thought my head was going to explode, going, What the fuck are these people talking about? I don't understand what this deconstructive semiotic bullshit is. Who the fuck is Michel Foucault?"

"I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault's History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power. There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality."

"Foucault is an interesting case because I'm sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it."

"Following Kant, Foucault criticized the practices that impede maturity, issuing a powerful warning against blind submission to the will of authorities. With Kant, he also insisted that the subject has a “right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth”. Indeed, Foucault notes that his view of critique resembles Kant's idea of enlightenment: both involve “the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility”. For Foucault, moreover, philosophy as a whole exemplifies this art. The history of philosophy is a history of parrěsia, of the courageous practice of speaking truth to power. By the end of his regrettably short life, then, Foucault recognized that he belonged to the tradition of critical philosophy that runs from Kant and Hegel “to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on”. As a critical thinker, he promoted maturity by encouraging his readers to engage in sustained – critical and self-critical – reflection on the historical conditions that have made them what they are. For by understanding how they are entangled in these conditions, readers might be able to rise above them and resist them. And, for Foucault, whatever freedom we can meaningfully be said to possess consists in resistance to prevailing forms of power."

"The history of the very institution of the prison is a history of reform. Foucault points this out."

"I openly avow myself the pupil of that mighty thinker Michel Foucault, and even here and there coquette with the modes of expression peculiar to him. But at least for my purposes his useful ideas suffer a certain mystification in his hands: he presents them upside-down, as it were. They must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

"From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault's writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics."

"I have been thinking a lot about this question. Foucault always subscribed to a number of social projects. And in his texts he was talking to readers in an ongoing transformative process. Over the past year I edited his 1971–1972 lectures at the Collège de France, together with Bernard Harcourt, and it became clear to me that his thinking revolved around the idea of change, of transformation, of individuals and collectives. In the stale climate of the 1960s we thought the transformation could occur only through literature and art. And in the early 1970s, when things were opening up, Foucault thought that social change was possible merely by changing a small number of very important relations of power — for example, the prison system. But already in 1976 he realized that this project of social change was a failure, and that people are much more easily mobilized by religious motives or nationalistic ones. The great movements weren't social. He didn't give up on his project of social change. But it had gotten more complicated."

"Foucault, always focused on the exercise of power and repression, tells his students to read Hayek and crew “with special care.” He found much to commend in their work. First and foremost, true liberalism is “imbued with the principle: ‘One always governs too much.’” As important, it asks (and answers) the question, “Why, after all, is it necessary to govern?”"

"What, then, are the grounds that determine Foucault to shift the meaning of this specific will to knowledge and to truth that is constitutive for the modern form of knowledge in general, and for the human sciences in particular, by generalizing this will to knowing self-mastery into a will to power per se and to postulate that all discourses (by no means only the modern ones) can be shown to have the character of hidden power and derive from practices of power? It is this assumption that first marks the turning from an archeology of knowledge to a genealogical explanation of the provenance, rise, and fall of those discourse formations that fill the space of history, without gaps and without meaning."

"In 1982, Foucault invited me to the Collège de France for six weeks. On the first evening we spoke about German films: Werner Herzog and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg were his favourite directors, whilst I spoke out in favour of Alexander Kluge und Volker Schlöndorff. Later we told each other about the curriculum of our respective years of philosophical study, which took something of a different course. He recalled how Lévi-Strauss and structuralism had helped him to liberate himself from Husserl and “the prison of the transcendental subject”. With regard to his discourse theory of power, I asked him at the time about the implicit standards on which his criticism was based. He merely said: “Wait for the third volume of my History of Sexuality“. We had already arranged a date for our next discussion about “Kant and the Enlightenment”. I was very shocked when he died in the interim."

"We talked about Michel Foucault as an example of someone who in theory seemed to challenge those simplistic binary oppositions and mind/body splits. But in his life practice as a teacher, he clearly made a separation between that space where he saw himself as a practicing intellectual-where he not only saw himself as a critical thinker but was seen as a critical thinker-and that space where he was body. It really is clear that the space of high culture was where he was in mind, and the space of the street and street culture (and popular culture, marginalized culture) was where he felt he could be most expressive of himself within the body."

"This sort of infinitely relativistic 'Foucaultism' actually says nothing about anything; but it does bear a close family resemblance to the more commonly held view that 'all' women, 'all' peasants were unpolitical. (Foucault is a prominent French scholar and scholastic.) This is extremely patronising, of course, and based on no shred of evidence. Indeed, in the case of French strikers it requires a poker-faced denial of that evidence. It also allows the authors of such views to dispense with the political dimensional together, on the circular ground that they have shown politics to be of no concern to the people under investigation. The premise is the conclusion and vice-versa."

"In the course of the 1960s there emerged a plethora of applied structuralisms: in anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, political science and of course literature. The best-known practitioners—usually those who combined in the right doses scholarly audacity with a natural talent for self-promotion—became international celebrities, having had the good fortune to enter the intellectual limelight just as television was becoming a mass medium. In an earlier age Michel Foucault might have been a drawing-room favourite, a star of the Parisian lecture circuit, like Henri Bergson fifty years earlier. But when Les Mots et les Choses sold 20,000 copies in just four months after it appeared in 1966 he acquired celebrity status almost overnight. Foucault himself foreswore the label 'structuralist', much as Albert Camus always insisted he had never been an 'existentialist' and didn't really know what that was. But as Foucault at least would have been constrained to concede, it didn't really matter what he thought. 'Structuralism' was now shorthand for any ostensibly subversive account of past or present, in which conventional linear explanations and categories were shaken up and their assumptions questioned. More importantly, 'structuralists' were people who minimized or even denied the role of individuals and individual initiative in human affairs."

"Two widespread assumptions lay behind such thinking, shared very broadly across the intellectual community of the time. The first was that power rested not—as most social thinkers since the Enlightenment had supposed—upon control of natural and human resources, but upon the monopoly of knowledge, knowledge about the natural world; knowledge about the public sphere; knowledge about oneself; and above all, knowledge about the way in which knowledge itself is produced and legitimized. The maintenance of power in this account rested upon the capacity of those in control of knowledge to maintain that control at the expense of others, by repressing subversive 'knowledges'. At the time, this account of the human condition was widely and correctly associated with the writings of Michel Foucault. But for all his occasional obscurantism Foucault was a rationalist at heart. His early writings tracked quite closely the venerable Marxist claim that in order to liberate workers from the shackles of capitalism one had first to substitute a different account of history and economics for the self-serving narrative of bourgeois society. In short, one had to substitute revolutionary knowledge, so to speak, for that of the masters: or, in the language of Antonio Gramsci so fashionable a few years earlier, one had to combat the 'hegemony' of the ruling class."

"The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was at home in both media, but his successors and imitators know only the camera."

"Basically, Foucault was Nietzsche’s ape. He adopted some of Nietzsche’s rhetoric about power and imitated some of his verbal histrionics. But he never achieved anything like Nietzsche’s insight or originality. Nietzsche may have been seriously wrong in his understanding of modernity: he may have mistaken one part of the story—the rise of secularism—for the whole tale; but few men have struggled as honestly with the problem of nihilism as he. Foucault simply flirted with nihilism as one more “experience.”"

"Many cultural historians have found both inspiration and an intellectual rationale for their synchronic approach in the work of a celebrated and controversial French thinker, Michel Foucault. Along with E. P. Thompson and Fernand Braudel, Foucault is among the most influential figures in recent Western historiography. But while even their critics express respect for Thompson's and Braudel's achievements, Foucault is a thinker many historians love to hate, if only because he was not a member of the discipline but a philosopher who wrote books based on historical sources. A mythical figure even in his relatively short lifetime (he died in 1984, aged fifty-eight), Foucault was a brilliant intellectual polymath who, although formally trained in philosophy, developed an early interest in the history of psychiatry and produced as his doctoral thesis a thousand-page study of madness in early modern Europe. His many books include philosophical histories of the knowledge-systems of early modern and modern Europe, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, a multivolume meditation on the history of sexuality, and the book many consider his masterpiece, Discipline and Punish, a study of the shift in Western societies from physical punishment to imprisonment as the standard response to crime."

"[A] number of points are worth making at once [that challenge Foucault's Madness and Civilization]: (1) There is ample evidence of medieval cruelty towards the insane; (2) In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the mad were already confined, to cells, jails or even cages; (3) ‘dialogue’ or no ‘dialogue’, even madness during those times was frequently connected with sin -- even in the Ship of Fools mythology; and, to that extent, it was regarded in a far less benevolent light than suggested by Foucault (pre-modern minds accepted the reality of madness -- ‘madness as a part of truth’ -- just as they accepted the reality of sin; but this does not mean they valued madness, any more than sin; (4) as Martin Schrenk (himself a severe critic Foucault) has shown, early modern madhouses developed from medieval hospitals and monasteries rather than as reopened leprosaria; (5) the Great Confinement was primarily aimed not at deviance but at poverty -- criminal poverty, crazy poverty or just plain poverty; the notion that it heralded (in the name of the rising bourgeoise) a moral segregation does not bear close scrutiny; (6) at any rate, as stressed by Klaus Doerner, another of critic of Foucault (Madmen and the Bourgeoisie, 1969), that there was no uniform state-controlled confinement: the English and German patterns, for example, strayed greatly from the Louis Quatorzian Grand Renfermement; (7) Foucault's periodization seems to me amiss. By the late eighteenths century, confinement of the poor was generally deemed a failure; but it is then that confinement of the mad really went ahead, as so conclusively shown in statistics concerning England, France, and the United States; (8) Tuke and Pinel did not ‘invent’ mental illness. Rather, they owe much to prior therapies and often relied also on their methods; (9) moreover, in nineetenth-century England moral treatment was not that central in the medicalization of madness. Far from it: as shown by Andrew Scull, physicians saw Tukean moral therapy as a lay threat to their art, and strove to avoid it or adapt it to their own practice. Once more, Foucault's epochal monoliths crumble before the contradictory wealth of the historical evidence."

"So at bottom Foucault's enterprise seems stuck on the horns of a huge epistemological dilemma: if it tells the truth, then all knowledge is suspect in its pretense of objectivity; but in that case, how can the theory itself vouch for its truth? It's like the famous paradox about the Cretean Liar--and Foucault seemed quite unable to get out of it (which explains why he didn't even try to face it)."

"Foucault annexed history to philosophy. Nobody yet knows for sure which of the two came out more damaged in the process, history or philosophy."

"Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have, and you will quickly find that subversion takes many forms, not all of them congenial to [Judith] Butler and her allies. As a perceptive libertarian student said to me, Why can't I use these ideas to resist the tax structure, or the antidiscrimination laws, or perhaps even to join the militias? Others, less fond of liberty, might engage in the subversive performances of making fun of feminist remarks in class, or ripping down the posters of the lesbian and gay law students' association. These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren't they daring and good? [...] Well, there are good answers to those questions, but you won't find them in Foucault"

"The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else's. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults. [...] The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault."

"As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record. [...] Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirking glibness an art form."

"The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them."

"A proper encounter with Foucault's work permanently changes one's understanding of how people are governed in modern society."

"Foucault's response to attempts such as those of Habermas, Dewey, and Berlin - attempts to build a philosophy around the needs of a democratic society - is to point out the drawbacks of this society, the ways in which it does not allow room for self-creation, for private projects. Like Habermas and Sellars, he accepts Mead's view that the self is a creation of society. Unlike them, he is not prepared to admit that the selves shaped by modern liberal societies are better than the selves earlier societies created. A large part of Foucault's work - the most valuable part, in my view - consists in showing how the patterns of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies have imposed on their members kinds of constraints of which older, premodern societies had not dreamed. He is not, however, willing to see these constraints as compensated for by a decrease in pain, any more than Nietzsche was willing to see the resentfulness of "slave-morality" as compensated for by such a decrease."

"Foucault revealed the universal truths hidden in societal extremes."

"It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The mi­nority view was always that power could be undermined by truth [...] Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is sim­ply an effect of power, you've had it. [...] But American de­partments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess."

"There are certainly many insights in Foucault's early writings. But the relativist method – which identifies reality with a way of apprehending it – must lead us to doubt that they are hard-won. For this method allows him to jump across to the finishing line of historical enquiry, without running the hard track of empirical enquiry. Consider what would really have to be proved by someone who believed man to be an artefact, and a recent one at that – more recent even than the medieval and renaissance humanists who extolled man's virtues. A proper assessment of Foucault's thought must therefore try to separate its two components: the relativist sleight of hand (which would lead us too simply to dismiss him), and the ‘diagnostic’ analysis of the secret ways of power. It is the second that is interesting, and which is expressed in Foucault's claim that each successive form of ‘knowledge’ is devoted to the creation of a discourse favourable to, and symbolic of, the prevailing forms of domination."

"The impression created by these later works is of a Foucault who has been ‘normalized’. His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style – all have been put, at last, to a proper use, in order to describe the human condition respectfully, and to cease to look for the secret ‘structures’ beneath its smile. It helps that his subject-matter is the ancient world, and the works of authors who cannot be dismissed or debunked as merely ‘bourgeois’. But it helps too that Foucault had, by this time, been ‘mugged by reality’, and was being cared for in the institution which he had once scoffed at for its habit of confronting its inmates with the ‘truth’ of their condition. It was when confronted with the truth of his condition that Foucault at last grew up. He had gone down with Sartre into the hell where the Other resides. But he had recognized his own otherness too, and returned to the real world in a posture of acceptance. And, reading these later works, I was constantly drawn to the thought that Foucault's belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all that we have."

"Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and then when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" ["You did not understand; you are an idiot"] (hence "terroriste")."

"Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether."

"The name ‘Foucault’ was first spoken to me in dark, conspiratorial tones, as if he were a threat to the then-alluring project of combining Althusser's ideology-centred thinking and the British culture-and-hegemony thinking. Foucault, along with Weber, Popper, Berlin, and many others (the list was a tiresomely long one) had to be rejected, or so I was told. My mind was soon changed on that score. The exciting work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (see esp. Hindess and Hirst 1975, 1977), who had worked through the Althusser and British Cultural Marxist possibilities more thoroughly than anyone else I had then read (or have read since), indirectly opened up the idea that Foucault was not only not a threat to the best-alternative project I shared with hundreds of others, but was the key to that project's success. At last, here was a thinker who could treat power seriously yet undogmatically, someone who could relate power to society without making it read like the script of a prison movie. I was hooked. I tried my best to understand (or to sound like I understood) all the methodological innovations that came with the Foucault package – ‘archaeology’, ‘genealogy’, ‘discourse’, ‘episteme’, and so on. My excitement reached its peak when, using these tools, Foucault appeared to have succeeded in crafting an entirely new approach to the study of government, under a term of his own invention, ‘governmentality’. But, as so often happens in life, the peak of excitement turned out to be the moment when doubts emerged. These doubts became stronger, eventually leading me to think that Foucault's works from this period too often pronounce and too rarely argue from the historical evidence."

"Foucault's achievement in so quickly building such an enthralling account of the operation of power in society is all the more remarkable when one remembers the dominant hold that Marxist and neo-Marxist accounts had in the Anglophone academy in the 1970s and even into the 1980s. The key to his success probably lies in the fact that he did not initially present his insights in abstract terms but instead allowed them to emerge from his painstaking histories of various knowledge endeavours, or sciences, particularly psychiatry, psychology, penology, and sexology. Without bludgeoning his readers, Foucault allowed them to see mostly power where others would see mostly science."

"In making these various critical points, I am not proposing that Foucault should lose his place in the social and political theory hall of fame. He undoubtedly deserves his berth (as well as deserving what all the other inductees have won as a right: the right to be constructively criticised). I am not even suggesting that Foucault's writings on power are totally tainted by the problems I have highlighted. Certainly, many of his pronouncements about surveillance, for instance, along with the examples offered above look overblown now. The fact that the panopticon was never actually built should have alerted more readers (including me) to this at the time his main power pieces were being published, as should have the fact that the ‘eye of power’ arrangements of hospitals, schools, factories, and so forth (see esp. Foucault 1980: 146–65) were more a matter of architectural fashion, among other things, than they were an attempt to enhance the surveillance of subjects. But making claims that now look overblown is not much of a charge; it was the 1970s after all. I think that in this context I should dismiss that charge as trivial and concentrate instead on the fact that the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality project (both published posthumously: Foucault 1986a, 1986b) – books in which the problem of ‘theorising’ stressed above is totally absent – were inspirational to Peter Brown in producing some of the most exciting and convincing work on power produced in the last thirty years (see esp. Brown 1988). This is both Foucault on power and Foucault at his very best: ‘the author of descriptive genealogies – “grey, meticulous and patiently documentary”’ (Saunders, quoting Foucault, 1997: 105–6)"

"Sequestered in the usual sectarianism of the academic world, no stimulating reading had existed that took into consideration the arguments of Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, or Milton Friedman. On this point, one can only agree with Lagasnerie: Foucault allowed us to read and understand these authors, to discover in them a complex and stimulating body of thought. On that point I totally agree with him. It's undeniable that Foucault always took pains to inquire into theoretical corpuses of widely differing horizons and to constantly question his own ideas."

"A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments."

"There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."

"In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return."

"Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?"

"A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?"

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections."

"Nous sommes fatigués de l'arbre. Nous ne devons plus croire aux arbres, aux racines ni aux radicelles. Nous en avons trop souffert. Toute la culture arborescente est fondée sur eux, de la biologie à la linguistique. Au contraire, rien n'est beau, rien n'est amoureux, rien n'est politique, sauf les tiges souterraines et les racines aériennes, l'adventice et le rhizome."

"One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values."

"Evaluations, in essence, are… ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate."

"This is Nietzsche’s twofold struggle: against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticizing things in the name of established values (the “philosophical labourers”, Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211); but also against those who criticise or respect values by deriving them from simple facts, from so-called “objective facts” (the utilitarians, the “scholars”, BGE Part 6). In both cases philosophy moves in the indifferent element of the valuable in itself or the valuable for all. Nietzsche attacks both the “high” idea of foundation which leaves values indifferent to their origin and the idea of simple causal derivation or smooth beginning which suggests an indifferent origin for values. Nietzsche substitutes the pathos of difference or distance (the differential element) for both the Kantian principle of universality and the principle of resemblance dear to the utilitarians. “It was from the height of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for them; what did utility matter?” (GM I 2 p. 26)"

"Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple."

"When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III “Of the three evil things”). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego."

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs and starts . It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it."

"Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature""

"Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man."

"Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, post-structuralism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence."

"Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance it seems there is nothing to say about it."

"Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy; to impose it by force is to undermine it."

"Pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world. The absence of any obstacle to the deployment of strength is dangerous for the strong themselves: passion takes precedence over reason. "No power without limit can be legitimate," as Montesquieu wrote long ago. Political wisdom does not consist in seeking only immediate victory, nor does it require systematic preference of "us" over "them.""

"A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself."

"American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming."

"Fantasy changes the world deliberately, allowing impossible things which science fiction at least pretends not to allow. Yes, I say "what if magic worked, and then...," and "what if there were dragons... yes. Then you just follow out, you just follow the fictional enterprise like any novelist, it seems to me, and the more detailed and accurate you are, the better the book will be. And of course, the tricky thing about imaginative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy, is the coherence of the imagination, because you are making a whole world out of words only. It's all made to hold together. Tolkien is very clear about that in some of his essays. He's the best theorist of fantasy I know, actually, Tolkien himself. The European fantasy theorists, Todorov, and those people, they are terrible, terrible. The works they are talking about always seem so insignificant to me. That's not what I mean by fantasy."

"I regarded these events as the customary disturbances of a state in which a new usurper tends to pluck the sceptre from his predecessor. ...As the natural ideas of equality were developed it was possible to conceive the sublime hope of establishing among us a free government exempt from kings and priests and to free from this double yoke the long usurped soil of Europe. I readily became enamored of this cause... the greatest and most beautiful which any nation has ever undertaken. ...You will judge whether it is I or my adversaries who are terrorists and persecutors. ...I accuse them of having violated ...all the rules of natural justice, of being ignorant and evil, of profaning the words of humanity and justice in invoking them, just as tyranny was organized in the name of liberty. Finally, of having given themselves up to a boundless revolutionary fury which ought to cover then with disgrace and scorn."

"I am sorry not to have known the mathematician who first made use of this method because I would have cited him. Regarding the researches of d'Alembert and Euler could one not add that if they knew this expansion they made but a very imperfect use of it. They were both persuaded that an arbitrary and discontinuous function could never be resolved in series of this kind, and it does not seem that anyone had developed a constant in cosines of multiple arcs, the first problem which I had to solve in the theory of heat."

"Letter, quoted by Vladimir Dobrushkin, "Biography of Joseph Fourier" & Elena Presitini, The Evolution of Applied Harmonic Analysis (2004) p. 42."

"The analytical equations, unknown to the ancient geometers, which Descartes was the first to introduce into the study of curves and surfaces, are not restricted to the properties of figures, and to those properties which are the object of rational mechanics; they extend to all general phenomena. There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and from obscurities, that is to say more worthy to express the invariable relations of natural things. Considered from this point of view, mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperatures; this difficult science is formed slowly, but it preserves every principle which it has once acquired; it grows and strengthens itself incessantly in the midst of the many variations and errors of the human mind. Its chief attribute is clearness; it has no marks to express confused notions. It brings together phenomena the most diverse, and discovers the hidden analogies which unite them."

"Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy. Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space. The object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element obeys. The theory of heat will hereafter form one of the most important branches of general physics."

"If we consider further the manifold relations of this mathematical theory to civil uses and the technical arts, we shall recognize completely the extent of its applications. It is evident that it includes an entire series of distinct phenomena, and that the study of it cannot be omitted without losing a notable part of the science of nature. The principles of the theory are derived, as are those of rational mechanics, from a very small number of primary facts, the causes of which are not considered by geometers, but which they admit as the results of common observations confirmed by all experiment."

"Profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries."

"The question of terrestrial temperature, one of the most remarkable and difficult in natural philosophy... I have... condensed in a single essay... the results of this theory. The analytical details... I have already published. I was specially desirous of presenting... a complete view of the phenomena and the mathematical relations... between them."

"The heat of the earth is derived from three sources... 1. ...[S]olar rays; the unequal distribution of which causes diversities of climate. 2. ...[T]he common temperature of the planetary spaces; being exposed to the radiation from the innumerable stars which surround the solar system. 3. The earth preserves in its interior that primitive heat which it had at the time of the first formation of the planets. ...We will show ...the principle features of these phenomena."

"The solar system is situated in a region of the universe, every point of which has a common and constant temperature, determined by the rays of light and heat which proceed from the surrounding stars. This low temperature is a little below that of the polar regions of the earth."

"The earth would have only the same temperature as the heavens, were it not for two causes... One is the internal heat... possessed at its formation... only dissipated through the surface; the other is the continued action of the solar rays... which produce at the surface, the diversities of climate."

"Liquids are very poor conductors of heat; but they have, like aeriform media, the property of carrying it rapidly in certain directions. This is the same property which, combining with, combining with the centrifugal force, displaces and mingles all parts of the atmosphere... [and] ocean, and maintains in them, regular and immense currents."

"The interposition of the air very much modifies the effects of the heat upon the surface of the globe. The solar rays traversing the atmospheric strata, which are condensed by their own weight [at decreasing altitudes], heat them very unequally; those which are rarest are likewise coldest, because they... absorb a smaller part of the rays. The heat of the sun... in the form of light, possesses the property of penetrating transparent solids or liquids, and loses this property... when by... terrestrial bodies, it is turned into heat radiating without light."

"This distinction of luminous and non-luminous heat, explains the elevation of temperature caused by transparent bodies."

"We shall describe... the principal results of the prolonged action of the solar rays upon the terrestrial globe. ...[T]he state of the mass has varied continually in proportion to the heat received. This variable... internal temperature... has approached... nearer to a final state... subject to no change. Then each point of the solid sphere has acquired, and preserves... a fixed temperature, which depends only on the situation of the point... The final state of the mass, the heat of which has penetrated all... parts, can... be compared to... a vessel which receives by openings at the top, liquid from some constant source, and permits exactly an equal quantity to escape by orifices. Thus the solar heat has accumulated in the interior of the globe and is... continually renewed."

"We... now consider the second cause of terrestrial heat, which... resides in the planetary spaces. ...[A]scertain what would be the thermometrical state of the terrestrial mass, if it received only the heat of the sun. To facilitate... first leave the atmosphere out of the account. ...[I]f the earth and all the bodies of the solar system, were placed in space deprived of all heat ...The polar regions would be subject to intense cold and the decrease of temperature from... equator to... poles would be incomparably more rapid and extended. In this hypothesis of the absolute cold of space, all the effects of heat... at the surface of the earth, should be attributed to... the sun. The least variance in... [its] distance... from the earth, would occasion... considerable changes in temperature. The interruption of day and night would produce effects sudden... [B]odies, would be exposed... at commencement of night, to a cold of infinite intensity. Animals and vegetables could not resist... the sudden and powerful change... produced at the rising of the sun."

"The primitive heat... in the interior of the earth would not increase the external temperature of space... for... the effect of this central heat has long since become insensible at the surface, although it may be very great at a moderate depth."

"We conclude... that there exists a physical cause always present which modifies the temperature at the surface of the earth, and gives this planet a fundamental heat, which is... independent of the action of the sun and that internal heat preserved... It is to be attributed to the radiation from all the bodies in the universe, whose light and heat can reach us... rays which penetrate every part of the planetary regions... [A]ny point of space whatever which contains these bodies acquires a fixed temperature."

"This temperature of space is not the same in different regions of the universe; but it does not vary in the regions... [of] planetary bodies... [T]he planets of our system... equally participate in the common temperature... augmented for each... by the rays of the sun, according to the distance of the planet from... [it]. ...The intensity and distribution of heat on the surface of these bodies results from the distance from the sun, the inclination of the axes of rotation to the orbit, and the state of the surface..."

"From the constitution of the solar system it is... probable that the temperature of the poles... are a little less than that of space... the same for all... although the distances from the sun may be unequal."

"It is difficult to know how far the atmosphere influences the mean temperature of the globe... It is to... M. de Saussure that we are indebted for a capital experiment which appears to throw... light on this... The theory of the instrument is... 1st... the acquired heat is concentrated, because it is not dissipated immediately by renewing the air; 2d, that the heat of the sun, has properties different from those of [invisible] heat... The rays... are transmitted in considerable quantity through the glass plates... They heat the air and the partitions which contain it. Their heat thus communicated ceased to be luminous, and preserves only the properties of non-luminous radiating heat. In this state it cannot pass through the plate of glass covering the vessel. ...It is necessary to consider attentively this order of facts, and the results of the calculus when we would ascertain the influence of the atmosphere and waters upon the thermometrical state of our globe."

"[I]f all the strata of air of... the atmosphere... preserved their density with their transparency, and lost only the mobility... peculiar to them, this mass of air, thus become solid, on being exposed to the rays of the sun, would produce an effect the same in kind... [as] just described."

"The mobility of the air, which is rapidly displaced... and... rises when heated... diminish the intensity of the effects... [of] a transparent and solid atmosphere, but do not entirely change their character."

"We shall now consider that peculiar heat which our globe had at the time of the formation of the planets, and which continues to be dissipated at the surface under the influence of the low temperature of the planetary space."

"In a military school directed by monks, the minds of the pupils necessarily waver only between two careers in life—the church and the sword. Like Descartes, Fourier wished to be a soldier; like that philosopher he would doubtless have found the life of a garrison very wearisome. But he was not permitted to make the experiment. His demand to undergo the examination for the artillery, although strongly supported by our illustrious colleague Legendre, was rejected with a severity of expression of which you may judge yourselves: "Fourier," replied the minister, "not being noble, could not enter the artillery, although he were a second Newton.""

"Fourier's analytical theory of heat (final form, 1822), devised in the Galileo-Newton tradition of controlled observation plus mathematics, is the ultimate source of much modern work in the theory of functions of a real variable and in the critical examination of the foundation of mathematics."

"At the age of twenty-one he went to Paris to read before the Academy of Sciences a memoir on the resolution of numerical equations, which was an improvement on Newton's method of approximation. This investigation of his early youth he never lost sight of. He lectured upon it... he developed it... it constituted a part of a work entitled Analyse des equations determines (1831), which was in press when death overtook him. This work contained "Fourier's theorem" on the number of real roots between two chosen limits. Budan had published this result as early as 1807, but there is evidence to show that Fourier had established it before Budan's publication. These brilliant results were eclipsed by the theorem of Sturm, published in 1835."

"Fourier took a prominent part at his home in promoting the Revolution. Under the French Revolution the arts and sciences seemed for a time to flourish. ...The Normal School was created in 1795, of which Fourier became at first pupil, then lecturer. His brilliant success secured him a chair in the Polytechnic School, the duties of which he afterwards quitted, along with Monge and Berthollet, to accompany Napoleon on his campaign to Egypt. Napoleon founded the Institute of Egypt, of which Fourier became secretary. In Egypt he engaged not only in scientific work, but discharged important political functions. ...In 1827 Fourier succeeded Laplace as president of the council of the Polytechnic School."

"He carried on his elaborate investigations on the propagation of heat in solid bodies, published in 1822 in his work entitled La Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur. This work marks an epoch in the history of mathematical physics. "Fourier's series" constitutes its gem. By this research a long controversy was brought to a close, and the fact established that any arbitrary function can be represented by a trigonometric series. The first announcement of this great discovery was made by Fourier in 1807 before the French Academy. The trigonometric series \sum_{n=0}^{n=\infty} (a_n\sin nx+b_n\cos nx) represents the function \phi(x) for every value of x if the coefficients a_n = \frac{1}{\pi}\int_{-\pi}^{\pi}\phi(x) \sin nx\,dx, and b_n be equal to a similar integral. The weak point in Fourier's analysis lies in his failure to prove generally that the trigonometric series actually converges to the value of the function."

"It is true that M. Fourier had the opinion that the principal end of mathematics was the public utility and the explanation of natural phenomena; but such a philosopher as he is should have known that the unique end of science is the honor of the human mind, and that from this point of view a question of number is as important as a question of the system of the world."

"He started as a convinced Jacobin... and ended up a cautious liberal."

"He ranks among the most important scientists of the 19the century for his studies in the propagation of heat... and the paternity of the expression ""—effet de serre—is attributed to Fourier."

"The novelty of his method... initially perplexed... mathematicians... from Lagrange to Laplace and Poisson. ...[P]ublication ...was ...delayed as many as fifteen years during which he ...defended, explained and extended [his work]."

"The formula and even the method was... used by Euler in... 1777, published... 1798. (Fourier... having failed to refer to earlier works...) ...[A]s with Bernoulli, Fourier had acquired an intimate understanding of the physical meaning of the problem. Over... two years... Fourier repeated all important experiments... carried out in England, France, and Germany and added experiments of his own. ...[S]triking ...confirmations of his new theory ...together with his overcoming ...difficulties advanced by the old masters. Fourier mentioned the motion of fluids... propagation of sounds and...vibrations of elastic bodies, as other applications ...fully aware of having opened up a new era for the solution or partial differential equations... It was the era of linearization that would dominate mathematics for the first half of the nineteenth century and... has remained important... The diffusion equation is a : Linear combinations of solutions are still solutions. It was not the first such equation... in history... but the method opened up enormous... possibilities."

"Galileo and Hooke demonstrated that every sound is characterized by a precise number of vibrations per second, but the full understanding of even the simplest... vibrators requires... calculus. ...Leonard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Joseph Louis Lagrange all studied the vibrating string.... In 1747 d'Alembert found... the wave equation and in 1753 Bernoulli stated the... decomposition of every motion of a string as a sum of elementary sinusoidal motions. Then at the beginning of the following century Fourier developed "harmonic analysis.""

"To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious."

"All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient."

"As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost."

"He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign."

"Thus the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics. It has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in everything there is a complete absence of complexity, subtlety or feeling, except for unity. It has no variety in its monotheism."

"In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact."

"Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him."

"To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed."

"Jesus, in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government. That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse."

"Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?"

"La colonisation en grand est une nécessité politique tout à fait de premier ordre. Une nation qui ne colonise pas est irrévocablement vouée au socialisme, à la guerre du riche et du pauvre. La conquête d'un pays de race inférieure par une race supérieure, qui s'y établit pour le gouverner, n'a rien de choquant."

"We aspire not to equality but to domination. Countries inhabited by foreign races must become again countries of serfs, farm laborers, and factory workers. The goal is not to suppress inequities, but, rather, to amplify them and to make of them a matter of course."

"La régénération des races inférieures ou abâtardies par les races supérieures est dans l'ordre providentiel de l'humanité. L'homme du peuple est presque toujours chez nous un noble déclassé ; sa lourde main est bien mieux faite pour manier l'épée que l'outil servile. Plutôt que de travailler, il choisit de se battre, c'est- à-dire qu'il revient à son premier état. ."

"Regere imperio populos, voilà notre vocation."

"La nature a fait une race d'ouvriers ; c'est la race chinoise, d'une dextérité de main merveilleuse sans presque aucun sentiment d'honneur; gouvernez-la avec justice , en prélevant d'elle pour le bienfait d'un tel gouvernement un ample douaire au profit de la race conquérante, elle sera satisfaite ; une race de travailleurs de la terre, c'est le nègre ; soyez pour lui bon et humain, et tout sera dans l'ordre; -- une race de maîtres et de soldats, c'est la race européenne ."

"I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life."

"You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect."

"Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation"

"To write well is to think well; there is no art of style distinct from the culture of the mind. The good writer is a complete mind, gifted with judgment, passion, imagination, and at the same time well trained. The inner qualities of rectitude, of brilliant geniality, are not given; instruction, wealth of information, fulness of knowledge, are acquired. Thus good training of the mind is the only school of good style. Wanting that, you have merely rhetoric and bad taste."

"A Muslim who knows French will never be a dangerous Muslim."

"The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism."

"The true Semitic society is that of the tent and of the tribe."

"Nature, on the other hand, plays a very small role in the Semitic religions: the desert is monotheistic; sublime in its immense uniformity, it primarily revealed to man the idea of 'infinite.'"

"Thus, the Semitic race is recognizable almost solely through negative characteristics: it has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in sum an absence of complexity, of nuance, an exclusive sentiment of unity."

"No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud ... of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaiis, laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become."

"A famous student of history has bequeathed to us a definition of nationality which is worth attention: I refer to Ernest Renan, of whom George Meredith once said to me, while the great French critic was still living, that there was more in his head than in any other head in Europe. Renan tells us that "Man is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his language, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation.""

"There has always been an element of the magical in the style of M. Ernest Renan—an art of saying things in a way to make them beautiful."

"[T]he entire course of French history since then has been influenced by something that happened in the eighteenth century” and asks “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?"

"For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. ... At its higher level the golden age of Muslim civilization was both an immense scientific success and a exceptional revival of ancient philosophy. These was not its only triumphs; literature was another: but they eclipse the rest. First, science: it was there that the Saracens ... made the most original contributions. These, in brief, were nothing less than trigonometry and algebra (with its significantly Arab name). ... Equally distinguished were Islam's mathematical geographers, its astronomical observatories and instruments ... [.] The Muslims also deserve high marks for optics, for chemistry ... and for pharmacy. More than half the remedies and healing aids used by the West came from Islam ... [.] Muslim medical skill was incontestable. ... In the field of philosophy, what took place was rediscovery - a return, essentially of the peripatetic philosophy. The scope of this rediscovery, however, was not limited to copying and handling on, valuable as that undoubtely was. It also involved continuing, elucidating and creating."

"Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history."

"India survived only by virtue of its patience, its superhuman power and its immense size. The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors’ opulence. … The Muslims … could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves."

"Braudel was not a Hindu chauvinist, just a scholarly observer, but in today’s climate, he would be blacklisted."

"In mathematics, perhaps more than in any other branch of knowledge, ideas spring fully armed from the creator's brain; thus mathematical talent usually reveals itself at a young age; and second-rate researchers play a smaller role than elsewhere, the role of a sounding board for a sound they do not contribute to shape."

"... the geometry over p-adic fields, and more generally over complete local rings, can provide us only with local data; and the main tasks of algebraic geometry have always been understood to be of a global nature. It is well known that there can be no global theory of algebraic varieties unless one makes them "complete", by adding to them suitable "points at infinity," embedding them, for example, in projective spaces. In the theory of curves, for instance, one would not otherwise obtain such basic facts as that the number of poles and zeros of a function are equal, of that the sum of residues of a differential is 0."

"God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."

"First rank scientists recruit first rank scientists, but second rank scientists tend to recruit third rank scientists, third rank scientists recruit fifth rank, and so on. If the director of the Department is genuinely interested in preserving the high quality of his Institute, he must exercise all of his power to put things in their right place, otherwise the deterioration process is destined to diverge indefinitely."

"An important point is that the p-adic field, or respectively the real or complex field, corresponding to a prime ideal, plays exactly the role, in arithmetic, that the field of power series in the neighborhood of a point plays in the theory of functions: that is why one calls it a local field."

"It is hard for you to appreciate that modern mathematics has become so extensive and so complex that it is essential, if mathematics is to stay as a whole and not become a pile of little bits of research, to provide a unification, which absorbs in some simple and general theories all the common substrata of the diverse branches if the science, suppressing what is not so useful and necessary, and leaving intact what is truly the specific detail of each big problem. This is the good one can achieve with axiomatics (and this is no small achievement). This is what Bourbaki is up to."

"About ancient mathematics (whether Greek or Mesopotamian) and medieval mathematics (Western or Oriental), the would-be historian must of necessity confine himself to the description of a comparatively small number of islands accidentally emerging from an ocean of ignorance, and to tenuous conjectural reconstructions of the submerged continents which at one time must have bridged the gaps between them."

"We should ask our fellow physicists to invent a principle of anti-interference, which would bring light out of two obscurities (Leray and Grothendieck)."

"‘[…] his correspondence with Digby, and, through Digby, with the English mathematicians WALLIS and BROUCKNER occupies the next year and a half, from January 1657 to June 1658. It begins with a challenge to Wallis and Brouckner, but at the same time also to Frenicle, Schooten “and all others in Europe” to solve a few problems, with special emphasis upon what later became known (through a mistake of Euler’s) as “Pell’s equation”. What would have been Fermat’s astonishment if some missionary, just back from India, had told him that his problem had been successfully tackled there by native mathematicians almost six centuries earlier!’"

"Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced, if only rarely, the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously, and in which the unconscious (however one interprets this word) seems to play a role. In a famous passage, Poincaré describes how he discovered Fuchsian functions in such a moment. About such states, Gauss is said to have remarked as follows: "Procreare jucundum (to conceive is a pleasure)"; he added, however, "sed parturire molestum (but to give birth is painful)." Unlike sexual pleasure, this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do so at will, unless perhaps by dogged work which it seems to reward with its appearance. It is true that the pleasure experienced is not necessarily in proportion with the value of the discoveries with which it is associated."

"In comparison with the wise man, the saint is perhaps just a specialist - a specialist in holiness; whereas the wise man has no specialty. This is not to say, far from it, that Dehn was not a mathematician of great talent; he left behind a body of work of very high quality. But for such a man, truth is all one, and mathematics is but one of the mirrors in which it is reflected - perhaps more purely than it is elsewhere."

"Hopf, back from Amsterdam, was teaching Brouwer's topology. He had helped arrange lodgings for me quite close to where he lived, rather far from the center of town, and together we would take the long tram ride to the university. One day I asked him what he would do when he got tired of topology. He replied in all seriousness: "But I'll never get tired of topology!""

"I began to combine this ordinary form of touring with a specifically mathematical variety. I had formed the ambition of becoming, like Hadamard, a "universal" mathematician: the way I expressed it was that I wished to know more than non-specialists and less than specialists about every mathematical topic. Naturally, I did not achieve either goal."

"Is it mere coincidence that in India Pāṇini's invention of grammar had preceded that of decimal notation and negative numbers, and that later on, both grammar and algebra reached the unparalleled heights for which the medieval civilization of the Arabic-speaking world is known?"

"Both the Jews and the brahmins of southern India are communities that, for twenty centuries, have devoted themselves tirelessly to the most abstract subtleties of grammar and theology. For the Jews it was the study of the Talmud, a task often passed down from father to son; for the brahmins, it was the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. It is hardly surprising that the younger generations, when their time came, turned toward the sciences, and preferably the most abstract among them: this trend was merely the natural extension of millennial traditions."

"[On meeting Raymond Paley] At first, we seemed to be on completely different wavelengths. Finally, it became apparent to me that he worked fruitfully only when competing with others: having the rest of the pack at his side spurred him to greater efforts as he tried to surpass them. In contrast, my style was to seek out topics that I felt exposed me to no competition whatsoever, leaving me free to reflect undisturbed for years. No doubt every scientific discipline has room for such differences of temperament. What does it matter if a given researcher is motivated primarily by hopes of winning the Nobel prize? Sometimes it seems to me that Ganesh, the Hindu god of knowledge, chooses the bait, noble or vulgar, best suited to each of his followers."

"I had also, unsuccessfully, looked for the works of Saint John of the Cross. The flashing beauty of his poems would probably have moved me more than did Saint Theresa, but it was not until much later that I came to know his work. I read a little of Saint Theresa and became quickly convinced that mystic thought is at bottom the same in all times and places: reading Suzuki's popular works on Zen was soon to confirm this conclusion. ... Speaking of a saint whose behavior was somewhat eccentric, one of the monks remarked gently: "But Christianity is madness" ("el cristianismo es una locum"). This perfectly orthodox statement often comes to mind when I think about my sister's life."

"Awaiting me upon my return to Strasbourg were Henri Cartan and the course on "differential and integral calculus," which was our joint responsibility. ... One point that concerned him was the degree to which we should generalize Stokes' formula in our teaching. ... In his book on invariant integrals, Elie Cartan, following Poincare in emphasizing the importance of this formula, proposed to extend its domain of validity. Mathematically speaking, the question was of a depth that far exceeded what we were in a position to suspect. ... One winter day toward the end of 1934,1 thought of a brilliant way of putting an end to my friend's persistent questioning. We had several friends who were responsible for teaching the same topics in various universities. "Why don't we get together and settle such matters once and for all, and you won't plague me with your questions any more?" Little did I know that at that moment Bourbaki was born."

"Otto Schmidt] called together the principal mathematicians in Moscow and Petrograd (later known as Leningrad) and spoke to them more or less as follows: "Whatever the regime, the work of mathematicians is too inaccessible to laymen for us to be criticized from the outside; as long as we stick together, we will remain invulnerable.""

"The major classic texts in analysis (Jordan, Goursat) which we had at first set out to replace aimed to set forth in a few volumes everything a beginning mathematician should know before specializing. At the end of the nineteenth century, such a claim could still be made seriously; by now it had become absurd. ... it soon became apparent that there was no alternative but to give up any idea of writing a text for college-level instruction. Above all it was important to lay a foundation that was broad enough to support the essential core of modern mathematics..."

"In establishing the tasks to be undertaken by Bourbaki, significant progress was made with the adoption of the notion of structure, and of the related notion of isomorphism. Retrospectively these two concepts seem ordinary and rather short on mathematical content, unless the notions of morphism and category are added. At the time of our early work these notions cast new light upon subjects which were still shrouded in confusion: even the meaning of the term "isomorphism" varied from one theory to another. That there were simple structures of group, of topological space, etc., and then also more complex structures, from rings to fields, had not to my knowledge been said by anyone before Bourbaki, and it was something that needed to be said. As for the choice of the word "structure," my memory fails me; but at that time, I believe, it had already entered the working vocabulary of linguists, a milieu with which I had maintained ties (in particular with Émile Benveniste)."

"Kantian ethic, or what passes for it today, has always seemed to me to be the height of arrogance and folly. Claiming always to behave according to the precepts of universal maxims is either totally inept or totally hypocritical; one can always find a maxim to justify whatever behavior one chooses. I could not count the times (for example, when I tell people I never vote in elections) that I have heard the objection: "But if everyone were to behave like you..." - to which I usually reply that this possibility seems to me so implausible that I do not feel obligated to take it into account."

"Already while at the Ecole Normale, I had been deeply struck by the damage wreaked upon mathematics in France by World War I. This war had created a vacuum that my own and subsequent generations were hard pressed to fill. In 1914, the Germans had wisely sought to spare the cream of their young scientific elite and, to a large extent, these people had been sheltered. In France a misguided notion of equality in the face of sacrifice - no doubt praiseworthy in intent - had led to the opposite policy, whose disastrous consequences can be read, for example, on the monument to the dead of the Ecole Normale. Those were cruel losses; but there was more besides. Four or more years of military life, whether close to death or far away from it - but in any case far from science -, are not good preparation for resuming the scientific life: very few of those who survived returned to science with the keenness they had felt for it. This was a fate that I thought it my duty, or rather my dharma, to avoid."

"Mozart's music, even at its most beautiful, often gives an impression of some being who, though very far above us in his incomprehensible serenity, nevertheless stops to remember us for a brief instant and comes within our reach, with gentle mockery and tender pity, to transcribe a fleeting message for us. But sometimes, in certain quartets and quintets, and in certain parts of The Magic Flute, this same being, without a thought for us, communicates with his fellow beings, and what we hear then is a world unknown to us, a world of which we are allowed only a furtive glimpse."

"(April 7) My mathematics work is proceeding beyond my wildest hopes, and I am even a bit worried - if it's only in prison that I work so well, will I have to arrange to spend two or three months locked up every year? In the meantime, I am contemplating writing a report to the proper authorities, as follows: "To the Director of Scientific Research: Having recently been in a position to discover through personal experience the considerable advantages afforded to pure and distinterested research by a stay in the establishments of the Penitentiary System, I take the liberty of, etc. etc.""

"One day it occurred to me to measure the speed with which such rumors were propagated. All I had to do was to start one - the more preposterous the better - at one end of the stadium, and then hasten to the other end to await the results."

"Alexandre Grothendieck was very different from Weil in the way he approached mathematics: Grothendieck was not just a mathematician who could understand the discipline and prove important results—he was a man who could create mathematics. And he did it alone."

"In his thesis, Weil generalized Mordell's theorem on the finite generation of the group of rational points on an elliptic curve, to abelian varieties of any dimension. Weil then hoped to use this finite generation result for the rational points on the jacobian of a curve to go on to show that when a curve of genus > 1 is imbedded in its jacobian, only a finite number of the rational points of the jacobian can lie on the curve. Not finding a way to do this, he decided to call his proof of finite generation (the "theorem of Mordell-Weill") a thesis, despite Hadamard's advice not to be satisfied with half a result!"

"Sometimes my sister and I dream of having a run-of-the-mill father. He would make coffee and toss salads. He would not prefer his work to us, and he would tell us instead: "How pretty you look, my dear, tell me what you did today." He would speak to us with words of affectionate banality."

"Yes, but there is the problem. It would have been banal. Mediocre. We had been trained to despise everything which was not excellent. How disgusting to see the father of one of our classmates or friends on vacation playing cards or, even worse, sitting on the sofa watching television. We blush with shame for our unfortunate little friend."

"When he was not busy doing math, he reads fat books covered with rough leather, on the pages of which can be seen very old, perfectly round holes dug out by medieval worms. Or else he passes through a museum while devoting himself to unbelievably profound notions about Van Gogh's paintings or Greek amphorae."

"For our genius of a father did not limit himself to math. His brain was an octopus, the tentacles of which extended in all directions. He could scan Latin verse and Greek verse as well, and it was as if he were hearing Homer or Theocritus in person. Not to mention the fact that he read Greek from volumes filled with characters which in no way resembled the ones in our Greek grammar or book of excerpts from Greek literature. He also read Sanskrit, with its truly bizarre letters. He spoke Italian like Dante, Spanish like Cervantes, and so for almost every living language."

"What the founders of modern science … had to do, was not criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all."

"The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology, infinite in Duration as well as Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance with eternal and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only those — all the others the departed God took with him... The Divine Artifex had therefore less and less to do in the world. He did not even have to conserve it, as the world, more and more, became able to dispense with this service..."

"There is something for which Newton — or better to say not Newton alone, but modern science in general — can still be made responsible: it is splitting of our world in two. I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world — the world of quantity, or reified geometry, a world in which, though there is place for everything, there is no place for man. Thus the world of science — the real world — became estranged and utterly divorced from the world of life, which science has been unable to explain — not even to explain away by calling it "subjective". True, these worlds are everyday — and even more and more — connected by praxis. Yet for theory they are divided by an abyss. Two worlds: this means two truths. Or no truth at all. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which "solved the riddle of the universe," but only to replace it by another riddle: the riddle of itself."

"The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical [sic] science–that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange."

"Koyré based his analysis on a narrow definition of science that focuses only on its purely theoretical aspects. He saw the Scientific Revolution as the advent and triumph of what he called the "mathematization of nature." At the same time he downplayed experimentalism as a relatively unimportant aspect of the new science."

"Koyré's exaltation of the "Platonic and Pythagorean" elements of the Scientific Revolution... was based on a demonstrably false understanding of how Galileo reached his conclusions. ...By avoiding consideration of nonmathematical sciences, Koyré reduced the Scientific Revolution to the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton."

"Li rois d'Engleterre et li sien, qui s'en venoient tout singlant, regardent et voient devers l'Escluse si grant quantité de vaissiaus que des mas ce sambloient droitement uns bos."

"Lors respondi li rois et demanda au chevalier, qui s'appelloit messires Thumas de Nordvich: "Messires Thumas, mes filz est il ne mors ne atierés, ou si bleciés qu'il ne se puist aidier?" Cilz respondi: "Nennil, monsigneur, se Dieu plaist; mais il est en dur parti d'armes: si aroit bien mestier de vostre ayde." "Messire Thumas, dist li rois, or retournés devers lui et devers chiaus qui ci vous envoient, et leur dittes de par moy qu'il ne m'envoient meshui requerre pour aventure qui leur aviegne, tant que mes filz soit en vie. Et dittes leur que je leur mande que il laissent à l'enfant gaegnier ses esporons; car je voel, se Diex l'a ordonné, que la journée soit sienne, et que li honneur l'en demeure et à chiaus en qui carge je l'ai bailliet.""

"Gautier, vous en irées à chiaus de Calais, et dirés au chapitainne, monsigneur Jehan de Viane, que vous avés tant travilliet pour yaus, et ossi ont tout mi baron, que je me sui accordés à grant dur à ce que la plus grant grasce qu'il poront trouver ne avoir en moy, c'est que il se partent de le ville de Calais six des plus notables bourgeois, en purs les chiés et tous, deschaus, les hars ou col, les clés de le ville et dou chastiel en leurs mains. Et de chiaus je ferai ma volonté, et le demorant je prenderai à merci."

"Ensi fu ceste bataille desconfite que vous avés oy, qui fu ès camps de Maupetruis à deux liewes de le cité de Poitiers, le vingt unième jour dou mois de septembre, l'an de grasce Nostre Signeur mil trois cens cinquante six. Si commença environ heure de prime, et fu toute passée à none; mès encores n'estoient point tout li Englès qui caciet avoient, retourné de leur cace et remis ensamble…Et fu là morte, si com on recordoit adonc pour le temps, toute li fleur de la chevalerie de France: de quoi li nobles royaumes fu durement afoiblis, et en grant misère et tribulation eschei, ensi que vous orés recorder chi après."

"Cils Jehan Balle avoit eut d'usage que, les jours dou diemence après messe, quant toutes les gens issoient hors dou moustier, il s'en venoit en l'aitre et là praiechoit et faissoit le peuple assambler autour de li, et leur dissoit: "Bonnes gens, les coses ne poent bien aler en Engletière ne iront jusques à tant que li bien iront tout de commun et que il ne sera ne villains ne gentils homs, que nous ne soions tout ouni.""

"Et, se venons tout d'un père et d'une mere, Adam et Eve, en quoi poent il dire ne monstrer que il sont mieux signeur que nous, fors parce que il nous font gaaignier et labourer ce que il despendent? Il sont vestu de velours et de camocas fourés de vair et de gris, et nous sommes vesti de povres draps. Il ont les vins, les espisses et les bons pains, et nous avons le soille, le retrait et le paille, et buvons l'aige. Ils ont le sejour et les biaux manoirs, et nous avons le paine et le travail, et le pleue et le vent as camps, et faut que de nous viengne et de nostre labeur ce dont il tiennent les estas."

"Et scahiez que Anglois et Escoçoiz, quant ilz se treuvent en bataille ensamble, sont dures gens et de longue alainne, et point ne s'esparngnent, mais s'entendent de eulx mettre à oultranche, comment qu'il prende. Ilz ne ressamblent pas les Alemans qui font une empainte, et, quant ilz voient qu'ilz ne puellent rompre ne entrer en leurs ennemis, ilz s'en retournent tout à ung fais."

"Ce lévrier nommé Blemach…laissa le roy et s'en vint tout droit au duc de Lancastre, et luy fist toutes les contenances telles que en devant il faisoit au roy Richart, et luy assist ses deux pies sus les epaules et le commença moult grandement à conjouir. Adont le duc de Lancastre qui point ne congnoissoit le lévrier, demanda au roy et dist: "Mais que veult ce lévrier faire?"…"Cestuy lévrier vous recueille et festoie aujourd'huy comme roy d'Angleterre que vous serés, et j'en seray déposé.""

"Considerés que c'est de pueple, quant il s'esmuet et esliève et il a puissance contre son seigneur, et par especial en Angleterre. Là n'y a-il nul remède, car c'est le plus périlleus poeuple commun qui soit au monde et le plus oultrageux et orgueilleux. Et de tous ceulx d'Angleterre Londriens sont chiefs."

"His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself. And the noble canon, with what true chivalrous feeling he confines his beautiful expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant and high-bred knight, of whom it was a pity to see the fall, such was his loyalty to his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood towards his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love! – Ah, benedicite! how he will mourn over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side he happens to favour, or on the other. But, truly, for sweeping from the face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvellous little sympathy."

"I should not complain of the labour of this work, if my materials were always derived from such books as the chronicle of honest Froissard...who read little, enquired much, and believed all. The original Memoirs of the marechal de Boucicault...add some facts, but they are dry and deficient, if compared with the pleasant garrulity of Froissard."

"At Queen Philippa's court his fastidious eyes were spared the sight, which was moving Langland to realism, of the disbanded soldiery begging their bread along the countryside. Most of his busy days were spent with princes and potentates, and it is idle to ask how far this experience suits the impartial muse of history…He possessed, too, a prodigious memory; and his keen eye for detail and the wealth and colour of his narrative produced such a record of the fourteenth century as Langland could never have composed. Posterity can but return thanks that the picture has been drawn from both aspects."

"Deux grands princes qui se voudroient bien entr'aymer, ne se devroient jamais voir, mais envoyer bonnes gens et sages les uns vers les autres, et ceux là les entretiendroient ou amenderoient les fautes."

"Ces deux ducs dessusdits estoient sages après le coup (comme l'on dit des Bretons)."

"Car on ne doit point tenir pour conseil ce qui se fait après disner."

"Qui a le profit de la guerre, il en a l'honneur."

"Les roys et princes en sont trop plus forts, quand ils l'entreprennent du consentement de leurs subjets, et en sont plus craints de leurs ennemis."

"Or, selon mon advis, entre toutes les seigneuries du monde, dont j'ay connoissance, où la chose publique est mieux traictée, et où règne moins de violence sur le peuple, et où il n'y a nuls édifices abatus, ni démolis pour guerre, c'est Angleterre; et tombe le sort et le malheur sur ceux qui font la guerre."

"Vous y trouverez le langage doux et aggreable, d'une naïfve simplicité, la narration pure, et en laquelle la bonne foy de l'autheur reluit evidemment, exempte de vanité parlant de soy, et d'affection et d'envie parlant d'autruy : ses discours et enhortemens, accompaignez, plus de bon zele et de verité, que d'aucune exquise suffisance, et tout par tout de l'authorité et gravité, representant son homme de bon lieu, et élevé aux grans affaires."

"On a souvent essayé de définir le Beau en art. Ce que c'est? Le beau, est ce qui paraît abominable aux yeux sans éducation."

"Ne jamais parler de soi aux autres et leur parler toujours d'eux-mêmes: c'est tout l'art de plaire. Chacun le sait et tout le monde l'oublie."

"Dans la langue de la bourgeoisie, la grandeur des mots est en raison directe de la petitesse des sentiments."

"Évidemment, les critiques n'ont été créés que le septième jour. S'ils avaient été créés le premier, qu'auraient-ils eu à faire?"

"Un livre n'est jamais un chef-d'œuvre, il le devient. Le génie est le talent d'un homme mort."

"Il n'y a que deux grands courants dans l'histoire de l'humanité: la bassesse qui fait les conservateurs et l'envie qui fait les révolutionnaires."

"S'il y a un Dieu, l'athéisme doit lui sembler une moindre injure que la religion."

"Une des joies d'orgueil de l'homme de lettres, — quand cet homme de lettres est un artiste, — c'est de sentir en lui la faculté de pouvoir immortaliser, à son gré, ce qu'il lui plait d'immortaliser. Dans ce peu de chose qu'il est, il a comme la conscience d'une divinité créatrice. Dieu crée des existences; l'homme d'imagination crée des vies fictives, qui laissent dans la mémoire du monde un souvenir plus profond, plus vécu pour ainsi dire."

"L'Anglais, filou comme peuple, est honnête comme individu. Il est le contraire du Français, honnête comme peuple et filou comme individu."

"J'ai à peindre…un caractère ambigu, un mélange de vertus et de vices, un contraste perpétuel de bons sentiments et d'actions mauvaises."

"On ne peut réfléchir sur les precepts de la morale sans être étonné de les voir tout à la fois estimés et négligés; et l'on se demande la raison de cette bizarrerie du cœur humain, qui lui fait goûter des idées de bien et de perfection dont il s'éloigne dans la pratique."

"Il n'y a que l'expérience ou l'exemple qui puisse déterminer raisonnablement le penchant du cœur. Or l'expérience n'est point un avantage qu'il soit libre à tout le monde de se donner; elle dépend des situations différentes où l'on se trouve placé par la fortune. Il ne reste donc que l'exemple qui puisse servir de règle à quantité de personnes dans l'exercice de la vertu."

"C'est un fonds excellent de revenu pour les petits, que la sottise des riches et des grands."

"Rien n'est plus admirable et ne fait plus d'honneur à la vertu, que la confiance avec laquelle on s'adresse aux personnes dont on connaît parfaitement la probité."

"Crois-tu qu'on puisse être bien tendre lorsqu'on manque de pain?"

"Combien trouve-t-on de déserteurs de la sévère vertu et combien en trouvez-vous peu de l'amour?"

"Il faut compter ses richesses par les moyens qu'on a de satisfaire ses désirs."

"Un cœur de père est le chef-d'œuvre de la nature."

"Rien n'est plus capable d'inspirer du courage à une femme que l'intrépidité d'un homme qu'elle aime."

"A mathematician, then, will be defined in what follows as someone who has published the proof of at least one non-trivial theorem."

"[Concerning the love La Fontaine felt for animals] He follows their emotions, he represents their reasonings, he becomes tender, he becomes gay, he participates in their feelings. The fact is, he lived in them. […] The animals contain all the materials of man-sensations, judgments, images."

"J'ai beaucoup étudié les philosophes et les chats. La sagesse des chats est infiniment supérieure."

"The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies."

"One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and unhealthy forms of the old combative societies, by what a backward step toward egoistic and brutal instincts, toward the sentiments, manner and morality of ancient cities and barbaric tribes, we know all too well."

"Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France."

"The critic who attempted to carry on 's ideas, who developed them in his own way and added his own distinct and remarkable contribution, was Hippolyte Taine. As an influence on all literary output since their time, the effect of the ideas of these two men is still extraordinary ..."

"M. Taine, looking as usual for formulas and labels, says that the most complete description of Balzac is that he was a man of business—a man of business in debt."

"The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression."

"The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence."

"There is always an attempt to move away from the Cross, that is, to perpetuate man’s misrecognition of his violence and protect his pride from the revelation. Without the Cross, there is no revelation of the fundamental injustice of the scapegoat mechanism, which is the founder of human culture, with all its repercussions in our relationships with each other."

"It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke."

"An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles."

"There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid."

"When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law - and finds no lawgiver."

"[Girard] overturned three widespread assumptions about the nature of desire and violence: first, that our desire is authentic and our own; second, that we fight from our differences, rather than our sameness; and third, that religion is the cause of violence, rather than an archaic solution for controlling violence within a society, as he would assert."

"In the name of all the competitors I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules which govern them, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams."

"Winning medals wasn’t the point of the Olympics. It’s the participating that counts."

"The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in Life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. To spread these principles is to build up a strong and more valiant and, above all, more scrupulous and more generous humanity."

"A better world could be brought about only by better individuals."

"I therefore think that I was right in trying from the outset of the Olympic revival to rekindle a religious awareness."

"If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?"

"To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods."

"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed."

"The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself."

"By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, naturalism identifies the existence and the conditions of existence of the physical world with existence and the conditions of existence in general. It forgets that the world of the physicist necessarily refers back, through its intrinsic meaning, through the subjective world which one tries to exclude from reality as being pure appearance, conditioned by the empirical nature of man, which is incapable of reaching directly to a world of things in themselves. But while the world of the physicist claims to go beyond naive experience, his world really exists only in relation to naive experience."

"The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung."

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

"The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being."

"The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others."

"The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice."

"The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks."

"To be or not to be is not the question where transcendence is concerned. The statement of being's other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness — the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence."

"When ethics thus moves into the domain of politics and becomes morality, the possibility of violence appears because of the threat of the application of such absolutist forms of thought. Further, although the moral agent must remain free in order to avoid the totalizing domination of the state, morality must still be grounded in the ethical relation of the face-to-face."

"According to Levinas, we construct our world in our individual minds, and this constructed reality has boundaries or "horizons" as Levinas calls it. But when the Face of the Other intrudes into this boundaried construction, what Levinas terms our "same," the Other inevitably becomes part of our construction. The key phrase is "our construction," because our construction of the Other is not the Other; the Other can never become one with our "same": it continually transcends our poor attempt to know it."

"In 1923 Levinas went to France to continue his studies, where he had Charles Blondell and Halbwachs as teachers."

"For Levinas there is a radical opposition between politics and religion. The former enslaves liberty by encompassing it within the 'Great All'. Religion on the other hand, which for Levinas is the metaphysical relationship with the Other, is based in respect and mutual aid even beyond need, submission and generosity."

"He teaches us that we can redeem our humanity by not just caring about our own perspective but by seeing details of the other individual in the mass of humans."

"Levinas teaches us that to be entitled with the adjective of human, you must first acknowledge the humanity of the other, and particularize the other within multitude, the one, the specific."

"How do wealth- and capital-output ratios evolve in the long run, and why? Until recently it was difficult to properly address this question, for one simple reason: national accounts were mostly about flows, not stocks. Economists had at their disposal a large body of historical series on flows of output, income and consumption – but limited data on stocks of assets and liabilities. When needed, for example for growth accounting exercises, estimates of capital stocks were typically obtained by cumulating past flows of saving and investment. This is fine for some purposes, but severely limits the set of questions one can ask."

"I am trying to put the distributional question and the study of long-run trends back at the heart of economic analysis. In that sense, I am pursuing a tradition which was pioneered by the economists of the 19th century, including David Ricardo and Karl Marx. One key difference is that I have a lot more historical data. With the help of , , Facundo Alvaredo, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Gabriel Zucman and many other scholars, we have been able to collect a unique set of data covering three centuries and over 20 countries. This is by far the most extensive database available in regard to the historical evolution of income and wealth. This book proposes an interpretative synthesis based upon this collective data collection project."

"We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics."

"In many ways, the US led the world toward the development of progressive taxation and the reduction of inequality at the global level during the first half of the 20th century... Unfortunately, one century later, in 2019, the rise of inequality creates new threats to liberal democracies. It is time to take a new step and to develop new policy instruments, in line with the challenges raised by global wealth trends."

"The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?"

"Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse but have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality—or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II."

"When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."

"Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts – and that is a very good thing."

"Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in."

"To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics."

"National income is defined as the sum of all income available to the residents of a given country in a given year, regardless of the legal classification of that income."

"Capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market."

"I can now present the first fundamental law of capitalism, which links the capital stock to the flow of income from capital. The capital/income ratio β is related in a simple way to the share of income from capital in national income, denoted α. The formula is"

"Broadly speaking, the rise of the supermanager is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon."

"Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). ... The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost inevitably, this tends to give lasting disproportionate importance to inequalities created in the past, and therefore to inheritance."

"The overall importance of capital today, as noted, is not very different from what it was in the eighteenth century. Only its form has changed: capital was once mainly land but is now industrial, financial, and real estate. We also know that the concentration of wealth remains high, although it is noticeably less extreme than it was a century ago. The poorest half of the population still owns nothing, but there is now a patrimonial middle class that owns between a middle and a third of total wealth, and the wealthiest ten percent now own only-two thirds of what there is to own rather than nine-tenths."

"Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this."

"Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them."

"The tragedy is that Trump’s program will only strengthen the trend towards inequality."

"The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development. Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than that."

"There should be no more signing of international agreements that reduce customs duties and other commercial barriers without including quantified and binding measures to combat fiscal and climate dumping in those same treaties."

"Ceta, the EU-Canada free trade deal, should be rejected. It is a treaty which belongs to another age. This strictly commercial treaty contains absolutely no restrictive measures concerning fiscal or climate issues. It does, however, contain a considerable reference to the “protection of investors”. This enables multinationals to sue states under private arbitration courts, bypassing the public tribunals available to one and all. The legal supervision proposed is clearly inadequate, in particular concerning the key question of the remuneration of the arbitrators-cum-referees and will lead to all sorts of abuses. At the very time when American legal imperialism is gaining in strength and imposing its rules and its dues on our companies, this decline in public justice is an aberration. The priority, on the contrary, should be the construction of strong public authorities, with the creation of a prosecutor, including a European state prosecutor, capable of enforcing their decisions."

"A balanced treaty between Canada and Europe, aimed at promoting a partnership for fair and sustainable development, should begin by specifying the emission targets of each signatory and the practical commitments to achieve these."

"It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these, Trumpism will prevail."

"The right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling."

"Recently, prominent historians and economists, among them Walter Scheidel and Thomas Piketty, have argued persuasively that major wars can also act to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and that the experience of the nations involved in the First and Second World Wars bears this out. Major wars stimulate employment; labour becomes more valuable so wages and benefits go up; and the rich pay higher taxes voluntarily, or find it harder to avoid doing so. At the end of destructive wars it is also easier to contemplate major programmes of reconstruction and social benefits and gain support for them. As William Beveridge, whose report laid the foundations for the British welfare state, wrote, ‘Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolution, not for patching.’"

"No one ever squared the circle with so much genius, or, excepting his principal object, with so much success."

"Mathematics and philosophy are cultivated by two different classes of men: some make them an object of pursuit, either in consequence of their situation, or through a desire to render themselves illustrious, by extending their limits; while others pursue them for mere amusement, or by a natural taste which inclines them to that branch of knowledge. It is for the latter class of mathematicians and philosophers that this work is chiefly intended j and yet, at the same time, we entertain a hope that some parts of it will prove interesting to the former. In a word, it may serve to stimulate the ardour of those who begin to study these sciences; and it is for this reason that in most elementary books the authors endeavour to simplify the questions designed for exercising beginners, by proposing them in a less abstract manner than is employed in the pure mathematics, and so as to interest and excite the reader's curiosity. Thus, for example, if it were proposed simply to divide a triangle into three, four, or five equal parts, by lines drawn from a determinate point within it, in this form the problem could be interesting to none but those really possessed of a taste for geometry. But if, instead of proposing it in this abstract manner, we should say: "A father on his death-bed bequeathed to his three sons a triangular field, to be equally divided among them: and as there is a well in the field, which must be common to the three co-heirs, and from which the lines of division must necessarily proceed, how is the field to be divided so as to fulfill the intention of the testator?" This way of stating it will, no doubt, create a desire in most minds to discover the method of solving the problem; and however little taste people may possess for real science, they will be tempted to try iheir ingenuity in finding the answer to such a question at this."

"There is reason, however, to think that the author would have rendered it much more interesting, and have carried it to si higher degree of perfection, had he lived in an age more enlightened and better informed in regard to the mathematics and natural philosophy. Since the death of that mathematician, indeed, the arts and sciences have been so much improved, that what in his time might have been entitled to the character of mediocrity, would not at present be supportable. How many new discoveries in every part of philosophy? How many new phenomena observed, some of which have even given birth to the most fertile branches of the sciences? We shall mention only electricity, an inexhaustible source of profound reflection, and of experiments highly amusing. Chemistry also is a science, the most common and slightest principles of which were quite unknown to Ozanam. In short, we need not hesitate to pronounce that Ozanam's work contains a multitude of subjects treated of with an air of credulity, and so much prolixity, that it appears as if the author, or rather his continuators, had no other object in view than that of multiplying the volumes. To render this work, then, more worthy of the enlightened agt in which we live, it was necessary to make numerous corrections and considerable additions. A task which we have endeavoured to discharge with all diligence"

"John Stephen Montucla, member of the National Institute, and of the academy of Berlin, censor royal for mathematical books, and author of this new-modelled and enlarged edition of the Mathematical Recreations of Ozanam, was born at Lyons, the 5th of September 1725. His father was a banker, by whom he was intended for the same profession; but the science of calculations, to which he was early introduced, soon produced a discovery of the natural bent of his mind. In the Jesuits college at Lyons he laid a good foundation in the ancient languages, as well as in the mathematical sciences, which enabled him afterwards easily to acquire a competent acquaintance with the Italian, the German, die Dutch, and the English, .which he not only read, but also spoke very well."

"In the qualities of his heart too Montucla was truly estimable: remarkably modest in his manner and deportment; benevolent far beyond the means of his small fortune: of a very respectable personal appearance; he spoke with ease and precision, but unassuming and with simplicity; related anecdotes and stories in a pleasant and playful manner; and breathing, in all his conduct and deportment the sweetness of virtue, and the delicacy of a fine taste."

"Montucla says, speaking of France, that he finds three notions prevalent among cyclometers: 1. That there is a large reward offered for success; 2. That the longitude problem depends on that success; 3. That the solution is the great end and object of geometry. The same three notions are equally prevalent among the same class in England. No reward has ever been offered by the government of either country. The longitude problem hi no way depends upon perfect solution; existing approximations are sufficient to a point of accuracy far beyond what can be wanted. And geometry, content with what exists, has long passed on to other matters. Sometimes a cyclometer persuades a skipper who has made land in the wrong place that the astronomers are at fault, for using a wrong measure of the circle; and the skipper thinks it a very comfortable solution! And this is the utmost that the problem has to do with longitude."

"Roy Ascott... aimed to achieve a wider 'cybernetic' awareness through acting on the psychology of the spectator, who was invited to regroup the elements of the technological universe and exploit certain of its meanings."

"As far as the sensory experience of the spectator goes, the most outstanding American kinetic artist is unquestionably the Chinese-born Wen-Ying Tsai. His pieces, which are perfect on the technological level, serve the primary purpose of giving a complete visual experience to the spectator, whose sound solicitations provoke a choreographic, chromatic and rhythmic response in the ‘cybernetic sculptures’. [...]"

"One of the main reasons for my interest early on in the art and technology relationship was that during my studies of movement and light in art I was struck by the technical components in this art. Contrary to most, if not all, specialists in the field who put the stress on purely plastic issues and in the first place on the constructivist tradition, I was convinced that the technical and technological elements played a decisive part in this art. One almost paradoxical experience was my encounter with the kinetic artist and author of the book Constructivism, George Rickey, and my discovery of the most subtle technical movements in his mobile sculptures. But what seemed to me still more decisive for my option towards the art and technology problematic was the encounter in the early 1950s with artists like Nicholas Schöffer and Frank Malina whose works were based on some first hand or second hand scientific knowledge and who effectively or symbolically employed contemporary technological elements that gave their works a prospective cultural meaning. The same sentiment prevailed in me when I encountered similar artistic endeavors from the 1950s onwards in the works of Piotr Kowalski, Roy Ascott and many others which confirmed me in the aesthetic option I had taken, particularly when I discovered that this option was not antinomic (contradictory) to another aspect of the creative works of the time, i.e. spectator participation."

"Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished."

"Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who looks at the historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical record between the years of the late-1960's up to the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), and Gene Youngblood's reference work Expanded Cinema (1970). Specifically, your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action and Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age (1993) are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today - in your terms virtualized."

"The good taste we speak of, which is that of literature, is not limited to what we call the sciences, but extends itself imperceptibly to other arts, such as architecture, painting, sculpture, and music. 'Tis the same discerning faculty which introduces universally the same elegance, the same symmetry, and the same order in the disposition of the parts; which inclines us to a noble simplicity, to natural beauties, and a judicious choice of ornaments. On the other hand, the depravation of taste in arts has been always a mark and consequence of the depravation of taste in literature. ... The good taste of literature reaches also to public customs, and the manner of living. An habit of consulting the best rules upon one subject, naturally leads to the doing it also upon others."

"It is not reasonable they should be solely employed in the study of the Greek and Latin authors, and having no curiosity to become acquainted with the writers of their own nation, remain always strangers in their own country."

"Nothing gives history a greater superiority to many branches of literature, than to see in a manner imprinted, in almost every page of it, the precious footsteps and shining proofs of this great truth, viz. that God disposes all events as supreme Lord and Sovereign; that he alone determines the fate of kings and the duration of empires; and that he transfers the government of kingdoms from one nation to another, because of the unrighteous dealings and wickedness committed therein."

"Mon siège est fait."

"I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English Revolution had begun the era of new governments. This revolution not only modified the political power, but it entirely changed the internal existence of the nation. The forms of the society of the Middle Ages still remained. The land was divided into hostile provinces, the population into rival classes. The nobility had lost all their powers, but still retained all their distinctions: the people had no rights, royalty no limits; France was in an utter confusion of arbitrary administration, of class legislation and special privileges to special bodies. For these abuses the revolution substituted a system more conformable with justice, and better suited to our times. It substituted law in the place of arbitrary will, equality in that of privilege; delivered men from the distinctions of classes, the land from the barriers of provinces, trade from the shackles of corporations and fellowships, agriculture from feudal subjection and the oppression of tithes, property from the impediment of entails, and brought everything to the condition of one state, one system of law, one people."

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers."

"What is most apparent and constant in Thomas' personality, the image he most likely had of himself, is the teacher. The saint was essentially a Doctor of the Church; the man was a teacher of theology and philosophy; the mystic never entirely separated his meditations from his teaching, which drew its inspiration from them."

"We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative."

"Thomas considers that a religious may legitimately aspire to the title and functions of master, but since he could only teach divine things, it is only in relation to the science of divine things that secular sciences can legitimately interest him. This is demanded by the very essence of the contemplative life, the teaching of which is nothing but its immediate extension into the order of the active life."

"What, then, will this philosophy be? Thomas only employed it for the service it renders Christian wisdom. No doubt this is why he never thought of separating it from this wisdom and giving it a name. He probably did not foresee that the day would come when people would go through his works to extract the elements of a philosophy from his theology. He himself never attempted this synthesis."

"The mathematician always proceeds from thought to being or things. Consequently, critical idealism was born the day Descartes decided that the mathematical method must henceforth be the method for metaphysics."

"Indeed, all idealism derives from Descartes, or from Kant, or from both together, and whatever other distinguishing features a system may have, it is idealist to the extent that, either in itself, or as far as we are concerned, it makes knowing the condition of being."

"With Descartes the Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] turns into Cogito ergo res sunt [I think, therefore things are]."

"As used today, the word realism means in the first place the opposite to idealism when it claims that it is possible to pass from the subject to the object."

"Reality can be grasped at levels of different depths. It is immediately given to us in a kind of block form, which is simply the "apprehended reality"."

"While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being."

"Up to Descartes' time, and particularly during the Middle Ages, it had always been agreed that philosophy consisted in a transposition of reality into conceptual terms"

"Having left us with thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body), [Descartes] does not know how to account for the union of soul and body."

"Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought."

"Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism."

"If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality."

"The scientific sterility of the Middle Ages has to be condemned for the same reasons which make it necessary today to condemn the philosophic sterility of scientism."

"If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it."

"Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing."

"I maintain, therefore, that just as there is in Cartesianism a methodical idealism, the kind that starts with nosse [knowing], there can be a methodical realism, the kind that starts with esse [being]."

"Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being."

"The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts."

"All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought."

"Gilson criticizes attempts to trace Dante's position back to Thomism or Averroism. For St. Thomas, every hierarchy of dignity is at the same time a hierarchy of jurisdiction, while for Dante—except for God—a hierarchy of dignity is never the foundation of a hierarchy of jurisdiction, and this corresponds to Dante's specific philosophical problem, which is not so much to define the essence of philosophy as to determine functions and jurisdictions. The principle governing this determination is absolutely irreconcilable with Thomism. St. Thomas knows only one ultimate end: eternal bliss, which can only be attained through the Church; moreover, the spirituality of the ultimate end implies that between temporal and spiritual power there is a hierarchical subordination of the means to the end. For Dante, on the other hand, man can obtain, through the exercise of political virtues, a human happiness completely distinct from heavenly bliss, even if the latter represents a higher end. The thesis of the “duo ultima” legitimizes the complete distinction between the political order and the religious order, which is equally universal to that of the Church, but autonomous and pursuing an end of earthly happiness."

"It is not that Dante intends to combat the cupiditas of the clergy in order to save the autonomy of the State; rather, “it is the struggle against cupiditas, the need to thoroughly permeate public life with religion, that leads him to distinguish between the orders.” In other words, the central point of his thinking, which leads him to overcome both Guelphism and Ghibellinism, is "the intuition of the concordance between the affirmation of the autonomy of the Empire, hitherto supported by heterodox thinkers, and that of the purification of the Church affirmed by spiritual writers," which is in line with what the best interpreter of Dante's philosophy, Étienne Gilson, defines as the singular and unique feature of his thought, irreducible to any source."

"I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles."

"Some good judges assert that his is the best French prose that can be found. Hugo's anagram, première prose, is apt and felicitous."

"Mérimée hated effects and pretense; he had no mercy for writers who strove to bring together words which were surprised to find themselves in the same company, who tried to polish their periods to give weird turns to trifling thoughts merely for the effect."

"When the youthful Queen Victoria was in Paris in 1840, she said to the Queen of France, whose guest she was, 'Do you find my French accent bad?' The Queen made a polite reply, but the King, Louis-Philippe, said to Victoria playfully, 'My dear child, they say that we here in the Tuileries do not speak very good French either. Let us send for Prosper Mérimée..."

"the perverted picture as seen in opera and drama may not become our permanent impression of Mérimée's Carmen. Stage versions and adaptations minimize the misery, squalor, and tragedy of the gypsy girl's life and thereby lose the tremendous force of Mérimée's story. To know both may be good, but to mistake one for the other is not. As one critic has said, "Mérimée's Carmen is a gentleman's Carmen.""

"To know that a human being truly is, he must be examined in the arena where he most fully realizes his nature, thus where he is most truly himself. Excellence (arete) is the object of ethics. Anthropology is therefore inseparable from ethics."

"If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue. ... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors."

"Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges?"

"Whereas, in our Occident, the most dry and sterile minds brag in front of Nature, the Indian genius, the most rich and fecund of all, knows neither small nor big and has generously embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of all souls."

"From India comes to us a torrent of light, a river of Right and Reason."

"That year will always remain a dear and cherished memory; it was the first time I had the opportunity to read the great sacred poem of India, the divine Rarnayana. If anyone has lost the freshness of emotion, let him drink a long draught of life, and youth from that deep chalice."

"Out of India, [[French Revolution|until [17]89]] there fell a torrent of light—the river of Right and Reason."

"My book is born in the full light of the sun among our forefathers, the sons oflight-Aryans, Indians, Persians and Greeks . . . . This trinity of light quite naturally met with opposition from the sombre genius of the South by way of Memphis, Carthage, Tyre and Judaea. Egypt in her monuments, Judaea with her scriptures, established their Bibles, tenebrous but of lasting influence.... Now that our parent Bibles have come to light it is more apparent to what extent the Jewish Bible belongs to another race. It is a great book, without doubt, and always will be- but how gloomy and full of gross equivocation-beautiful but full of doubt like death...."

"Follow the migrations of mankind from East to West along the sun's course and along the track of the world's magnetic currents; observe its long voyage from Asia to Europe, from India to France.... At its starting point, in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world ."

"India seemed to have a powerful attraction for Michelet. In the "Journal" he kept, the following note is to be found: The little ruins of the Mediterranean world can no longer assuage the craving for ruins which is felt by my ravaged heart. I need the desolations, the cataclysms of the Orient, the annihilation of whole races, the deserts...• The Hall of the Nibelungen is not enough. I need the great plain of the Indian world where the Gurus perish by the hundred thousand ...."

"The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice.... Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk."

"Michelet held that the Vedas "were undoubtedly the first monument of the world" and that from India emanated "a torrent of light and the flow of reason and Right". He proclaimed that "the migrations of mankind follow the route of the sun from East to West along the sun's course. . . . At its starting point, man arose in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world"."

"With the world began a war that will only end with the world, and not before: that of man against nature, mind against matter, freedom against fate. History is nothing but the story of this endless struggle."

"The intimate fusion of races is the identity of our nation, its personality."

"The last people in the world in whom the personality would consent to be absorbed into pantheism is the French."

"France is the daughter of freedom. In human progress, the essential part, the main force, is called man. Man is his own Prometheus."

"The history of France begins with the French language. Language is the primary sign of nationality."

"England is an Empire, Germany a race; France is a person."

"The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth."

"The American people were possessed by the capitalist spirit without ever having had a bourgeoisie; French political society, in contrast, created a bourgeoisie devoid of the capitalist spirit."

"Fascism was born of the reaction of the particular against the universal, the national against the international. In its origins it was inseparable from Communism, fighting the latter’s goals even while adopting its methods… Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian Socialism. The founder of the fasci in March 1919, Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy's entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party."

"Born of war, both Bolshevism and Fascism drew their basic education from war. They transferred to politics the lessons of the trenches: familiarity with violence, the simplicity of extreme passions, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, and finally the bitterness of futile or betrayed sacrifices."

"In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity ... It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal."

"To understand this relationship we may start with what has become an accepted observation: Stalinized Bolshevism and National Socialism constitute the two examples of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Not only were they comparable, but they form a political category of their own, which has become established since Hannah Arendt."

"The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little."

"What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler’s moral nihilism, called a ‘ Machiavellianism of the masses'."

"In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader."

"Nazism was a form of Bolshevism turned against its initial form."

"Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini."

"It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there, political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul. The irony, the tragedy, of history was that both totalitarian regimes, identical in their aim for absolute power over dehumanized beings, presented themselves as protection from the danger presented by the other."

"Nazism was a German form of Bolshevism."

"The Mussolinian fascism of 1919 can be seen as a 'reaction' to the threat of Italian-style Bolshevism, also arising out of the war and following more or less the Russian example—a reaction in the broadest sense of the word, since Mussolini, who, like Lenin, comes from an ultrarevolutionary socialism, can more easily imitate it in order to fight it."

"After all, in my country as well, and in democratic Europe, fascism, a fortiori in its Nazi form, was a more or less taboo subject for the historian. I mean that the moral condemnation directed against the two regimes precluded not only studying them, but also understanding the popularity they enjoyed between the two wars. And that taboo that impeded all types of comparative analysis, and even the idea of an interdependence between communism and fascism, was just as great, even if it did not have the same historical or cultural reasons."

"The fascist movement fed on anticommunism, the communist movement on antifascism. But both shared a hatred for the bourgeois world, which allowed them to unite."

"Lenin takes power in 1917, Mussolini in 1922, Hitler fails in 1923 to succeed ten years later. Thus, ten years later Mussolini fascism can be considered a 'reaction' to an Italian-style Bolshevism, also arising out of the war and more or less modeled on the Russian example. In the same manner, Nazism can be made into a response to the German obsession with the Komintern, a response along the dictatorial and revolutionary lines of communism."

"The German extreme Right, and even the entire Right, did not need communism to hate democracy. The national Bolsheviks admired Stalin. I concede that Hitler privileged the hatred of Bolshevism, but as a final product of the democratic bourgeois world. In fact, certain of his close accomplices, such as Goebbels, made no mystery of hating Paris and London more than Moscow."

"Therefore, I think that the thesis of fascism as a 'reactive' movement against communism only explains part of the phenomenon; it fails to explain the differences between Italian and German fascism… But Hitler and the Nazis didn't need this to give substance to their hatred of the Jews, which was older than the October Revolution. In fact, before them, Mussolini, whom they so admired, had led anticommunist fascism to victory without anti-Semitism."

"Because the only serious way to approach the study of the two original ideologies and political movements that appeared at the beginning of our century, Marxist-Leninist communism and fascism in its Italian and German forms, is to take them together as the two faces of an acute crisis of liberal democracy that arose with the First World War."

"The point communism and fascism have in common is the fundamental political deficit of modern democracy. The different types of totalitarian regimes that are established in their name share the will to put an end to this deficit by restoring the main role to political decisions and by integrating the masses into one party through the constant assertion of their ideological orthodoxy. The fact that the two ideologies proclaim themselves to be in a situation of radical conflict does not prevent them from reinforcing each other by this very hostility—the communist nourishes his faith with antifascism, and the fascist his with anticommunism. And both fight the same enemy, bourgeois democracy. The communist sees it as the breeding ground for fascism, while the fascist sees it as the antechamber of Bolshevism, but they both fight to destroy it."

"In the case of Hitler and his accomplices, however, the Jews not only incarnate Bolshevism in their eyes but also stateless capitalism. This allows the Nazis to magically unite in the same hatred a single people who presumably incarnated two contradictory ideas and social regimes."

"It is the fact of the privileged relationship of the Jews to democratic universalism that makes possible the understanding of the particular nature of modern anti-Semitism as opposed to medieval anti-Semitism. These two forms of hatred of the Jews are not incompatible, and their effects can be cumulative. But the older form is rooted in Christianity—in the Jewish refusal to recognize the divinity of Christ—whereas the more recent form doesn't have the same content as the Christian charge. Rather, it accuses the Jews of hiding a will to dominate the world behind the abstract universality of the world of money and the Rights of Man."

"The idea of the October Revolution as the product of a plot of international Judaism is part of this type of representation. I don't deny for an instant that there were numerous Jewish militants on the first Bolshevik staff as well as in the socialist movement, especially in the countries of Eastern Europe. But this is not an observation from which one can infer, even by definition, the existence of a particular Jewish plot. The accusation belongs on a different plane from that of rational thought or historical analysis."

"The historians of our era, obsessed by the determinist idea and by the sociological conception of history, often tend to misjudge what was accidental in the European tragedy in the twentieth century and the role played by several men. They don't want to see that sometimes monstrous events have small causes."

"The novelty of fascism in History consists in its emancipation of the European Right from the impasse that is inseparable from the counterrevolutionary idea. In effect, in the nineteenth century the counterrevolutionary idea never ceased being trapped in the contradiction of having to use revolutionary means to win without being able to assign itself any goal other than the restoration of a past from which, however, the revolutionary evil arose. There is nothing like this in fascism."

"The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies."

"Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge."

"Successive technological revolutions have immeasurably widened the psychological gap between generations. With some reason, perhaps, the man of the age of electricity and of the airplane feels himself removed from his masters."

"But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavour toward better understanding."

"There is no true understanding without a certain range of comparison."

"Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present...This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian."

"The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines."

"For in the last analysis it is human consciousness which is the subject matter of history."

"The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite was true. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a 'strange defeat'. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign. They had twice the number of wheeled vehicles and 4,638 tanks to the German 4,060. Moreover, French tanks had thicker armour and bigger guns. Yet when the German offensive was launched on May 10, 1940, many units put up only token resistance."

"Marc Bloch agreed that the débâcle was due at least in part to the abysmal quality of French generalship. A decisive factor was the German decision to switch the direction of their main attack from Luxembourg and the Low Countries, as Hitler had originally planned, to the line running between Liège and Namur, through the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes. The French would have fared better against the original strategy; they were wholly taken by surprise when five panzer divisions thrust their way through the Ardennes and captured the bridges over the River Meuse. Thereafter, their reactions were culpably slow or inept. Yet what happened in 1940 was more than just a military failure. At root, as Bloch argued, it was a collapse of morale."

"Marc Bloch has been a source of inspiration...one way to give some indicaion of my reaction to his work is to provide my thoughts in different decades to his work for...he meant something different to me in different phases of my work and my understanding of what he was saying has shifted considerably."

"All benefits of the sales of the American version of this book that I wrote... will be for the 90th Division Veterans Association, now and forever."

"At the end of the war there were no psychoanalysts or other counselors to see if you were going to get out of the terrifying experience of battle without psychological damage. ...some men had such deep ...damage that they ended up in veterans' nursing homes, where they were almost forgotten. Others... just tried to obliterate from their minds the episodes of inhumanity that they had experienced."

"Who am I to blame for all this? ...The guilty one is the crazy person who decided to begin a war when all may not have been done to avoid it."

"It's not easy to talk reasonably with a potentially insane enemy."

"When I go to a military cemetery... I pray for them and their families, but I mainly feel hatred for the war that froze their young bodies in time."

"Over the years, tens of thousands of veterans came back to Normandy. Several hundred of them honored us by accepting our hospitality. From them I learned much of what I know."

"Each witness to history who leaves us takes with him a page... even if my page is small it is important for the future and for the knowledge of, at the very least, my own descendants."

"About my English... I learned more from listening to Hank Williams of Johnny Cash... than from reading Shakespeare."

"There was always a natural evolution into my personality over the years. One thing is sure... I am what I always wanted to be, independent. This means obeying no other rules than the rule of law and of my religion."

"I am sorry for politicians who have to obey the rules of one party. I am affiliated with none."

"My affinities would classify me as slightly to the center-right. However, I occasionally prefer a good man from the left to an idiot of the right, and there are some."

"Until I reached ten, I may have been a true pain in the neck. The punishments, including the almost daily spankings from my exasperated mother, fortified me... I didn't have the chance to become a weak human being."

"Don't worry about me. I am normal. I have somehow improved with the years."

"Henri is slow to begin but you cannot stop him once he does begin."

"Symbolically, Ganesha represents the basic unity of the macrocosm and microcosm, the immense being (the elephant) and the individual being (man). This highly implausible identity is however a fundamental reality and the key to all mystic or ritual experience as well as to Yogic possibilities. Without being aware of Ganesha, and without worshipping him, no accomplishment is possible."

"When the two boys [Ganesha and Skanda] were of marriageable age, Shiva and Parvati did not know which of the children to marry off first. So they proposed a competition: We shall celebrate the marriage of the one who first returns after having gone round the world. The clever Ganesha walked around his parents and said to them “You are the Universe”. He was considered the winner and his wedding was celebrated with Siddhi (Success) and Buddhi (Intelligence), the two daughters of the Lord of the World - Visharupa."

"Sanskrit is constructed like geometry and follows a rigorous logic. It is theoretically possible to explain the meaning of the words according to the combined sense of the relative letters, syllables and roots. Sanskrit has no meanings by connotations and consequently does not age. Panini's language is in no way different from that of Hindu scholars conferring in Sanskrit today."

"Sanskrit was a complete success and became the language of all cultured people in India and in countries under Indian influence. All scientific, philosophical, historical works were henceforth written in Sanskrit, and important texts existing in other languages were translated and adapted into Sanskrit. For this reason, very few ancient literary, religious, or philosophical documents exits in India in other languages. The sheer volume of Sanskrit literature is immense, and it remains largely unexplored."

"The creation of Sanskrit, the “refined” language, was a prodigious work on a grand scale. Grammarians and semanticists of genius undertook to create a perfect language, artificial and permanent, belonging to no one, that was to become the language of the entire culture. Sanskrit is built on a basis of Vedic and the Prakrits, but has a much more complex grammar, established according to a rigorous logic. It has an immense vocabulary and a very adaptable grammar, so that words can be grouped together to express any nuance of an idea, and verb forms can be found to cover any possibility of tense, such as future intentional in the past, present continuing into the future, and so on. Furthermore, Sanskrit possesses a wealth of abstract nouns, technical and philosophical terms unknown in any other language. Modern Indian scholars of Sanskrit culture have often remarked that many of the new concepts of nuclear physics or modern psychology are easy for them to grasp, since they correspond exactly to familiar notions of Sanskrit terminology."

"From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races. Mahmoud Ghazni was an early example of Muslim ruthlessness, burning in 1018 of the temples of Mathura, razing Kanauj to the ground and destroying the famous temple of Somnath, sacred to all Hindus. His successors were as ruthless as Ghazni: 103 temples in the holy city of Benaras were razed to the ground, its marvelous temples destroyed, its magnificent palaces wrecked."

"Indeed, the policy of the Muslim invaders in India ‘seems to have been a conscious systematic destruction of everything that was beautiful, holy, refined (to Indians),’ concludes Danielou."

"India whose ancient borders stretched until Afghanistan, lost with the country of seven rivers (the Indus Valley), the historical center of her civilization. At a time when the Muslim invaders seemed to have lost some of their extremism and were ready to assimilate themselves to other populations of India, the European (British) conquerors, before returning home, surrendered once more to Muslim fanaticism the cradle of Hindu civilization."

"The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which...lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life."

"An enigmatic character, sly and acetic, ambitious and devout, one of those gurus who exert an incredible magnetism on the crowds and often lead them to disaster (…) a sentimental religiosity coupled with a lack of scruples (…) During his lifetime, no one could stop his fateful influence. It will take a long time before the victims of his charisma, in India as well as in the West, dare to make an account of his actions.... [Gandhi’s religion consisted in] ‘extreme puritanism, the strictest vegetarianism, the total absence of metaphysical concerns and philosophical culture, and, conversely, the grossest religious sentimentalism’ in which ‘icy puritanism masks dishonesty.’.... [Even Rabindranath Tagore] ‘detested the ambitious and wrong-headed Gandhi’ as ‘a very dangerous man’. ... ‘This character with his ascetic appearance always had the unconditional support of the great Indian capitalists’ and that ‘his social reforms always ended up benefiting the merchant bourgeoisie.’"

"We have no texts explaining the rites and ceremonial of the Dionysiac mysteries in the Greco-Etrusco-Roman world, although there are allusions which can often be clarified with the aid of Indian texts... By studying Shivaite rites [from India], the only ones which have continued down to our own times, the real practices of the Dionysiac rites and “mysteries” may be reconstructed."

"The course of history does not include eternal problems, problems of essences or of dialectics; it only offers valorizations that differ from one culture to another and even from one individual to another. ... What is opposed to time as well as eternity is our own valorization of the present. What does it matter that time passes and that its frontier wipes out our valorizations? No warrior has been shaken in his patriotism by the idea that, had he been born on the other side of the border, his heart would have beaten for the other side."

"L'histoire est anecdotique: elle intéresse en racontant, comme le roman."

"The Japanese spirit wavered from then on between the lure of the West and the need to preserve her territorial integrity. Slowly, inexorably, Western civilization covered up with its veneer this other civilization patiently built up in the course of centuries, long nurtured in suffering and in pride by generations of men and women. But this was only in semblance. The Japan of old still dwells deep in the soul of every inhabitant of her islands and manifests itself at every turn in some euphuistic subtlety or an exquisitely delicate courtesy."

"The spirit of Japan, conceived in the Nara epoch, carried in the womb of her islands throughout the Heian period, delivered in the anguish of the Middle Ages, schooled by the rod of iron of the Tokugawas, fully grown now, benefited from all her past experiences. She cannot forget them."

"Towards the end of the twelfth century, while Western Europe was still wavering between a dying Roman influence and a dawning Gothicism, preliminaries to a medieval era which would make possible the development of a world-wide humanism, Asia had already lived through her classical period and, sinking into decay, was preparing to face a long period of political and spiritual unrest. While India was beginning to suffer under the yoke of the victorious Mussulman, who had come down on her from the mountains of Afghanistan and the plains of Iran, and while the domination of the Khmers was reaching its climax at Angkor, China, under pressure from the barbarians of the north, was withdrawing to the south where the Song empire, thinking itself safe from invasions, continued to live a life of luxury."

"Mohammed Ghori had the Hindu temples of Ajmer demolished and ordered the construction of mosques and Quran schools on their ruins…He plundered Kanauj and Kashi and destroyed their temples... [While his generals] destroyed in passing the remaining Buddhist communities of Bihar and destroyed the universities of Nalanda.... Bakhtiar Khilji “established a Muslim capital in Lakhanauti (Gaur) on the Ganga and destroyed, in 1197, its basalt temples. In Odantpuri, in 1202, he massacred two thousand Buddhist monks.... [Meanwhile, back in Delhi:] “This Quwwat-ul-Islam (Might of Islam) was built in a hurry using the debris, chiefly sculpted pillars, of twenty-seven dismantled Hindu temples.” Thirty years later, “Iltutmish did not forget that he was a Muslim conqueror. He showed himself to be very pious, never forgetting to do his five devotional daily….He likewise showed himself totally intolerant vis-à-vis the Hindus who refused to convert, destroying their temples and annihilating Brahmin communities.”"

"Monarchist or collectivist, Germany will not change its nature."

"Nothing is more false than the axiom that governments are belligerent and peoples are pacific."

"For six years I have been writing...that the division of Europe into two camps armed to the teeth, one of which, the Triple Alliance, constantly resorts to intimidation, is bound to lead to the greatest European war since the revolutionary period. Well here it is."

"You will understand and know the German Republic better when it elects Hindenburg president."

"Having erased Sedan, we now must erase Waterloo. France cannot be a great continental power unless she is a Rheinish power... French political wisdom has never consisted in immoderate acquisitions. In the days of France's European hegemony, she always preferred influence and infiltration to indigestion."

"If Germany were to become Bolshevik we would be absolutely delighted. We wish it with all our heart. France has never been secure except when anarchy ruled in Germany... From a Bolshevished Germany, we would no longer have to fear what we underwent in 1870 and 1914."

"Our vision of European affairs has been warped by our obsession with Bolshevism. Under the cover of this grande peur, Germany has reorganized herself. She has used the specter of Bolshevism to divert attention from her own affairs while at the same time ridding herself of this poison."

"[Now is the perfect opportunity to revive] the wise and prudent policy constantly followed by the French monarchy, which consisted in putting the German colossus to sleep, dividing it, enfeebling it, profiting from its religious quarrels, its territorial divisions, the rivalry among its princes, its lack of money, its backward civilization."

"A Peace Treaty too Lenient for the Harshness it Contains [Une Paix trop douce pour ce qu'elle a de dur]."

"May 7, 1919 has not erased the date of January 18, 1871."

"The Rhineland liberated from Prussia or eternal war. The choice is ours."

"In countries where, as in France, there is still an agricultural population and a majority of propriétaires, one need not fear social subversion."

"When Frenchmen were in good health, when their intelligence was sound and vigorous, the idea of tradition was no less foreign to them than was the idea of revolution. The notion of returning to the chansons de geste and Saint Louis's oak tree would have seemed as ridiculous to them as wearing their fathers' breeches and hats out of filial piety."

"In order to avoid being unsettled by Bolshevism and its substitutes, one must be conscious of the superiority of Western civilization."

"One of the greatest mistakes that the Western world has committed, is to imagine that the colored peoples, in acceding to its type of civilization, would be drawing nearer to it."

"Do people really think that everything will be finished when we evacuate the Rhineland? On the contrary, it is certain that everything will begin, that the territorial demands will follow."

"[The significance of the Nazi gains in the 1930 election lay] neither in Hitler nor in his one-hundred-seven deputies [but rather in] the facility with which the German people follow those who recommend violence."

"Human history is a record of struggles between those who save and those who spend, between producers and consumers. These struggles have sometimes assumed the character of civil wars. It is the case of one tribe wanting to appropriate the more fertile soil and wealth of another tribe, or else within the same tribe, the have-nots wanting to expropriate the haves."

"When one has millions and millions of yellow and black subjects what a strange idea it is to proclaim the principle of popular self-determination."

"Dictatorships are like a good many other things in this world. They can be the best, or the worst, form of government. There are some excellent dictatorships, and there are some hateful ones."

"It is no mere caprice that has led us to connect a disordered currency with the emergence of despotic forms of government. The one precedes, and often begets, the other, because, for the vast majority of people, it is the most obvious symptom of national disintegration. This, again, is one reason why dictatorships are not all assignable to a common cause. A dictatorship may be a defensive reaction against anarchy and ruin, and against the effects of democracy carried to its ultimate conclusion, that is to say, to socialism and communism. On the other hand, it offers to a democracy fired with equalitarian and anti-capitalist zeal, the means of overthrowing the forces arrayed against it, and of enthroning itself in their place."

"Where do we find the first example of the modern dictator? In England. And what is England? The "Mother of Parliaments". The country which adopted for itself, and distributed in facsimile throughout the world, the form of parliamentary government. Cromwell makes us wonder whether a dictator is not a necessary concomitant of revolutions, of the rise of democracies and of the establishment of the parliamentary system."

"The more one studies, with the attention and sympathy one owes to noble undertakings, the rise of the Italian Dictator, the more we must hope that this great wave of national enthusiasm will not blind him, in the end, to those perils to which a revolution is particularly exposed, and Fascism is, first and foremost, a revolution. Those who want France to follow suit, will do well to think twice about it. The ‘Corporative Economy’ devised by Mussolini would be regarded as monstrous by our middle class and our traders, big and small. Before we think about copying a thing, we ought to know exactly what it is we are going to copy. The Gallic cock is not designed by nature to suck the dugs of the Roman wolf."

"The real Hitler did not exist before those years of hardship in Vienna, where he simultaneously discovered the dangers of Marxism and of Jewish World-Ascendancy. His real birth as a man of action dates from the day on which he discovered ethnology. It is in this department that a Frenchman is bound to find Mein Kampf singularly inadequate, singularly elementary. If we had to judge these fighting books by the same canons as we judge works of the mind, it is certain that the National Socialist Bible would not bear a moment's examination. The most puerile absurdities mingle with the most dubious scientific hypotheses, all couched in language whose pedantry, though it take one's breath away, probably contributed in large measure to the book's success with German readers."

"Perhaps in a sense the man [Adolf Hitler] will always elude us, but this much is certain: it is on him that all the hopes of the Germany that was vanquished in 1918 are centred. Our socialists are all at sea about him. Every step forward that he took, they said his fall was imminent. He mirrors too faithfully certain aspects of his country, for that fall, even if it occurs, to be of much account. But the important thing is to know him, not to suffer ourselves to be misled by his rudimentary and inchoate ideas. Beneath a very elementary philosopher, there leaps to the eye a politician who knows what he wants and whose position makes him, however vehemently he may declare and believe himself the contrary, France's most formidable antagonist."

"Poincaré has the highest esteem for you. Probably he envies you your right as a newspaperman to tell the French truths that he has not been able to tell them in the place he has occupied."

"Bainville predicted everything that has been happening, I wanted to believe that he was having a nightmare, that he was wrong... But here we are."

"Bainville transformed history from a conjectural science into an exact science."

"That fine spirit, that sad and dear Cassandra, did not have to consult the gods to see clearly but depended solely on his knowledge of history."

"[O]f far greater influence on public opinion was the appearance of Bainville's Histoire de deux peuples, which, like all Bainville's books, was distributed through very large printings and contributed, almost more than any other work, to the undermining of the revolutionary-democratic-socialist viewpoint and to the strengthening of the conviction that the dismemberment and impotence of Germany were indispensable to France's peace and greatness."

"Jacques Bainville, born 1879, met Maurras after his first journey to Germany, and willingly accepted the solutions of the older man for the alarming problem of Germany's superior power. After that, Germany never let him go. (In contrast to Maurras, he was acquainted with Germany by thorough observation and wide knowledge of its literature.) Narrower than Maurras intellectually but broader in understanding, he went beyond the "sectlike character" of the Action Française without ever abandoning it, for, in his own lofty words, he owed Maurras "tout, sauf le jour." However, the renown of his clear and apparently moderate spirit outshone that of the master's; he died in 1936, just after being appointed to Poincaré's chair in the Académie Française."

"Like Maurras he sees clearly but unlike Maurras and Daudet, he does not provoke controversy. This is an advantage, and a king has the same advantage, as the English know. He is above party. In the world of thought Bainville is above dispute. You will see, he will become a criterion."

"Unique in its crystalline irrefutability, Bainville's luminous column guides me unerringly across the desert of foreign policy."

"He had, by 1900, formed most of the main ideas that were to dominate his writings: hatred of disorder, romanticism, liberalism, democracy, internationalism, the French Revolution, and Germany."

"Bainville has dated Michelet and Aulard."

"The more I got to know [Bainville]...the more I felt myself conquered. That perfect and sober courtesy, the remarkable freedom of his thought, the elegant way in which he concealed the enormity of the labor that he accomplished each day, the charming absence of illusions and the taste for the true value of works and men, rendered him ever more desirable to see and converse with."

"There was no middle state. A man must be of the highest rank or live miserably."

"Most towns in Hindustan are made up of earth, mud, and other wretched material; that there is no city or town (that) does not bear evident marks of approaching decay."

"In eastern countries, the weak and the injured are without any refuge whatever; and the only law that decides all controversies is the cane and the caprice of a governor."

"[In these circumstances the peasant had little interest in cultivating the land. Bernier observes that] “as the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion… the whole country is badly cultivated, and a great part rendered unproductive… The peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and value… without leaving me the means (even) to drag my own miserable existence? - The Timariots (Timurids), Governors and Revenue contractors, on their part reason in this manner: Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness in our minds, and why should we expend our own money and time to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment… Let us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the peasant should starve or abscond…”"

"No artisan can be expected to give his mind to his calling in the midst of a people who are either wretchedly poor, or who, if rich, assume an appearance of poverty, and who regard not the beauty and excellence but the cheapness of an article; a people whose grandeess pay for a work of art considerably under its value and according to their own caprice… For it should not be inferred that the workman is held in esteem, or arrives at a stage of independence. Nothing but sheer necessity or blows from a cudgel keeps him employed; he never can become rich, and he feels it no trifling matter if he have the means of satisfying the cravings of hunger and of covering his body with the coarsest garment. If money be gained it does not in any measure go into his pocket, but only serves to increase the wealth of the merchant."

"[Francois Bernier, late in the seventeenth century, talks of originally “real Mongols”, “White men, foreigners”. He also says] “that children of the third and fourth generation [of Uzbegs, Persians, Arabs and Turks], who have the brown complexion… are held in much less respect than new comers, and are seldom invested with official situations: they consider themselves happy, if permitted to serve as private soldiers in the infantry or cavalry.”"

"[According to Bernier, the Mughals maintained] “a large army for the purpose of keeping people in subjection… No adequate idea can be conveyed of the sufferings of the people. The cudgel and the whip compel them to incessant labour… their revolt or their flight is only prevented by the presence of a military force.”"

"The Omarahs mostly consist of adventurers from different nations who entice one another to the court; and are generally persons of low descent, some having been originally slaves, and the majority being destitute of education. The Mogol raises them to dignities, or degrades them to obscurity; according to his own pleasure and caprice."

"[Describing the bazar held in Delhi near the Red Fort, Francois Bernier (seventeenth century) says that] “Hither, likewise, the astrologers resort, both Mahometan and Gentile. These wise doctors remain seated in the sun, on a dusty piece of carpet, handling some old mathematical instruments, and having open before them a large book which represents the sign of the Zodiac. In this way they attract the attention of the passenger… by whom they are considered as so many infallible oracles. They tell a poor person his fortune for a payssa… Silly women, wrapping themselves in a white cloth from head to foot, flock to the astrologers, whisper to them all the transaction of their lives, and disclose every secret with no more reserve than is practised by a penitent in the presence of her confessor. The ignorant and infatuated people really believe that the stars have an influence (on their lives) which the astrologers can control.”"

"The Great Mogol is a foreigner in Hindustan, a descendent of Tamerlane, chief of those Mogols from Tartary who, about the year 1401, overran and conquered the Indies. Consequently he finds himself in a hostile country, or nearly so; a country containing hundreds of Gentiles to one Mogol or even to one Mahometan. To maintain himself in such a country… he is under the necessity of keeping up numerous armies, even in the time of peace."

"Bernier says that the Rajput “Rajas never mount (guard) within a (Mughal) fortress, but invariably without the walls, under their own tents… and always refusing to enter any fortress unless well attended, and by men determined to sacrifice their lives for their leaders. This self devotion has been sufficiently proved when attempts have been made to deal treacherously with a Raja.”"

"The unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demand of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children who were carried away as slaves."

"…grandees pay for a work of art considerably under its value, and according to their own caprice. … When an Omrah or Mansabdar requires the services of an artisan, he sends to the bazar for him, employing force, if necessary, to make the poor man work; and after the task is finished, the unfeeling lord pays, not according to the value- of the labour, but agreeably to his own standard of fair remuneration; the artisan having reason to congratulate himself if the Korrah has not been given in part payment."

"Begum Sahib, the elder daughter of Shah Jahan was very handsome... Rumour has it that his attachment reached a point which it is difficult to believe, the justification of which he rested on the decision of the Mullas, or doctors of their law. According to them it would have been unjust to deny the king the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he himself had planted."

"[After commenting disapprovingly on 'strange' Hindu beliefs and rituals regarding eclipses, Bernier remarks:] The Great Mogol, though a Mahometan, permits these ancient and superstitious practices; not wishing, or not daring, to disturb the Gentiles in the free exercises of their religion."

"They [the Mughals] do not, indeed, forbid it (') by a positive law, because it is a part of their policy to leave the idolatrous population, which is so much more numerous than their own, in the free exercise of its religion ; but the practice is checked by indirect means."

"Writing about one or two of Jahan Ara’s amorous affairs, Bernier observes: ‘(I write because) Love adventures are not attended with the same danger in Europe as in Asia. In France they excite only merriment; they create a laugh, and are forgotten; but in this part of the world, few are the instances in which they are not followed by some dreadful and tragical catastrophe.’”"

"These poor people, when incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, are not only often deprived of the means of subsistence, but are bereft of their children, who are carried away as slaves. Thus it happens that many of the peasantry, driven to despair by so execrable a tyranny, abandon the country, and seek a more tolerable mode of existence, either in the towns, or camps ; as bearers of burdens, carriers of water, or servants to horsemen. Sometimes they fly to the territories of a Raja, because there they find less oppression, and are allowed a greater degree of comfort."

"It is indeed a striking thought that the same region of central Italy twice, in the shape of ancient Etruria and modern Tuscany, been the source of civilization in Italy. Since the seventh century BC and from the fifteenth century onwards, in the dawn of antiquity as well as at the beginning of modern times, the same region of the peninsula has been distinguished by exceptional qualities. The birth and re-birth or Renaissance of Italy had the same cradle."

"Like every old civilisation still represented on this globe, India has been, and is, increasingly, in spite of appearances, returning to its original sources... It is from the depths of that old civilisation that India is most likely to draw the strength needed to adapt itself to the modern world."

"The enthusiasm for Indian culture was widespread. Amaury de Riencourt in his The Soul of India tells us that philosophers like Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher, poets such as Goethe, Schillar, Novalis, Tieck and Brentano, historians like Herder and Schlegel, all acclaimed the discovery of Indian culture with cries of ecstasy: "India, the home of universal religion, the cradle of the noblest human race, of all literature, of all philosophies and metaphysics." And he adds that "this enthusiasm was not confined to Germany. The entire Romantic movement in the West put Indian culture on a lofty pedestal which the preceding Classical Movement had reserved for Greece and Rome.""

"The boundless riches of the Hindu faith, its universal appeal, its tolerance, the profundity of Hindu philosophy and its enduring roots among the Indian people all this made India a poor soil for West-Christian sowing."

"Take heed that ye love not human glory in any respect, lest your portion also be reckoned among those to whom it was said, "How can ye believe, who seek glory, one from another?" [John 5:44] and of whom it is said through the prophet, "Increase evils to them; increase evils to the boastful of the earth" [Isaiah 26:15]; and elsewhere, "Ye are confounded from your boasting, from your reproaching in the sight of the Lord." [Jeremiah 12:13] For I do not wish you to have regard to those, who are virgins of the world, and not of Christ; who unmindful of their purpose and profession, rejoice in delicacies, are delighted with riches, and boast of their descent from a merely carnal nobility; who, if they assuredly believed themselves to be the daughters of God, would never, after their divine ancestry, admire mere human nobility, nor glory in any honored earthly father: if they felt that they had God as their Father, they would not love any nobility connected with the flesh."

"God, at the beginning, created two human beings, from whom the whole multitude of the human race has descended; and thus it is not the equity of nature, but the ambition of evil desire, which has given rise to worldly nobility."

"When I left France for India, I came with a dream: I was going to the land of the Vedas, of the Buddha, a continent with an eternal religion. I thought everyone in this country was turned ‘inwards’, seeking a higher light; I believed India would soon be able to guide the world towards a more meaningful tomorrow. Why I am sad now? I can’t help feeling a terrible divide between this dream and today’s reality (at least the one depicted in the English media). I still believe in ’India of the ages’, but I cannot grasp why Indians themselves still refuse to acknowledge the greatness of their culture."

"Indeed, from the Indus eastwards, we lose track of this Bactrian invasion. Sergent himself admits as much: “For the sequel, archaeology offers little help. The diggings in India for the 2nd millennium BC reveal a large number of regional cultures, generally rather poor, and to decree what within them represents the Indo-Aryan or the indigenous contribution would be arbitrary. If Pirak (…) represents the start of Indian culture, there is in the present state of Indian archaeology no ‘post-Pirak’ except at Pirak itself, which lasted till the 7th century BC: the site remained, along with a few very nearby ones, isolated.” So, the Bactrian invaders who arrived through the Bolan pass and established themselves in and around the border town of Pirak, never crossed the Indus."

"The present stage of research effectively permits tracing an Asian origin for the Indo-Europeans well before their dispersion."

"The Kurgan people had to originate in Central Asia."

"One of the paradoxes of India is its astonishing linguistic diversity (they speak about five hundred languages there) compared with its cultural unity."

"Shiva, Varuna, Yama, Durga-Parvati, we already said it, are deities of IE origin, the rituals concerning fire, soma and the person of the king are equally of IE if not Indo-Iranian origin. But it is now obvious that the Indo-Aryans, upon arriving in India, have amply harvested the Harappan heritage and included its ritual customs (construction of hearth-altars, rites inside buildings, use of the stellar vestment, ritual baths, fixation of feasts on the stellar equinoxes…) in their own religion."

"“The Vedda, the Melano-Indians and the Indus people and the actual inhabitants of the northern half of India, which classical anthropology used to class as Mediterraneans, all belong to one same human ‘current’ of which they manifest the successive ‘waves’. Everything indicates, physical traits as well as geographical distribution, that the Vedda have arrived first, followed by the Melano-Indians, and then the Indus people.”... “The Italian anthropologist [Mario Cappieri] has emphasized not only that the skulls of Mohenjo Daro resemble those of today’s Sindh and those of Harappa resemble those of today’s Panjab, but even that the individual variability is identical today to what it was four thousand years ago.”"

"“I would have been horrified by what I perceive in the Indo-European world. . . . To live in a trifunctional system would give me the impression of living in a prison. Therefore, I study the three functions, I explore this prison, but I would never want to have lived there. If I was visiting cannibals, I would seek to know as much as possible about them but I would stay well away from the cauldron.”"

"“Greece chose, as always, the best part: instead of the ready-made reflections, the pre-established relationships of people and things that the heritage of its northern ancestors offered it, Greece preferred the risks and opportunities offered by criticism and observation—it regarded humanity, society and the world with new eyes.”"

"Assuming that I am completely wrong, my Indo-Europeans would be like the geometries of Riemann and Lobatchevski: constructions outside of reality. It is already not that bad. I will just have to switch shelves in the library. I will move to the “fiction” section."

"Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) is among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline, and even outside the academy. For half a century—from the 1930s up until his death—Dumézil was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Panthéon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Académie Française by Claude Lévi-Strauss as one of the “Forty Immortals.“ The scholarly work that had led Dumézil to this position was based on a wide-ranging hypothesis that all peoples who spoke Indo-European, or, as they were sometimes called even as late as the i960s, "Aryan“ languages had also inherited a common ideology. In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumézil had found traces of this ideology in Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns, and Old Norse saga literature. The ideology was characterized by a special three-part structure that organized distinct cultural fields. This structure above all guided the pantheon and the social order, but also such things as the classification of various kinds of heroic types, punishments, and taxes. At the highest level in this “Indo-European" tripartite structure was the "function“ of the sovereign holders of power—the priests, lawmakers, and kings; below it, that of the warriors; and at the bottom, the function of the people, or producers."

"The debate about Dumézil is still far from resolved. At its core is the question of whether it was only the Nazis who used the historical writing about "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," or, as the Germans say, “Indo-Germans” for political aims. Did Dumézil, and perhaps other researchers who were active during the 1930s and 1940s, do so as well? If that is the case, what does this entail for the postwar scholarship, which has largely followed the guiding principles of Dumézil? On a more general level, the debate is about whether there is something in the nature of research about Indo-Europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse—perhaps something related to the fact that for the past two centuries, the majority of the scholars who have done research on the Indo-Europeans have considered themselves descendants of this mythical race.(3)"

"During the postwar (post 1945 CE) period, these two theories (Father Wilhelm Schmidt and Father Wilhelm Kopper's theory of primal cultures, and Georges Dumezil's theory of Indo-European mythology) have completely dominated research about Indo-European religion and culture—in spite of the fact that they arose in an ideological atmosphere that did not differ much from the Nazi one (Arvidsson 2006, p. 239, parentheses added)."

"Lincoln argues that Dumézil was, on the contrary, deeply anchored in a Germanophobie French Fascism."

"Through Eribon’s defense, it has nevertheless been shown that Dumézil really did support the French Fascist organization Action française during the 1930s, and that he wrote articles, under a pseudonym, in which he praised Mussolini."

"It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumézil supported Action française and wrote for its journals. It was also during this period that he began to develop his own theories about Indo-European mythology. Is it possible that Dumézil used the ancient Indo-Europeans in the same way that the Nazi scholars did (albeit with an entirely different level of scientific accuracy and methodological acuteness)—to give historical legitimacy to a Fascist movement? Did Action française perhaps receive a mythology of origin, a narrative that ascribes such a fundamental meaning to certain ideas and norms that they seem natural and eternal, through the work of Georges Dumézil?"

"Without exaggeration and in a definitive reply to Momigliano (who paradoxically was a member of the Italian Fascist Party before having to flee Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws) and Ginzburg, we can state that Dumézil was not a Nazi supporter in the 1930s. He was, however, a fascist in the precise meaning of the term."

"In other cases, this suspicion is quite misplaced, e.g. in the case of Georges Dumézil, actually a critic of Nazism, cautious in public but quite outspoken in his minor writings and private communications. It is true that Dumézil sympathized with Italian Fascism, but Fascism stricto sensu contrasted with Nazism in very important respects, esp. in not being racist (the Communist-imposed usage of “fascism” as a generic term or as a synonym of National-Socialism, resulting from Stalin’s desire to avoid staining the term “socialism” with Hitlerian associations, obscures the contrast between the two systems). It has been shown that Dumézil’s sympathy for Fascism and contempt for Nazism may have influenced his views of ancient Germanic religion, which he contrasted unfavourably with ancient Roman religion. In Dumézil’s studies ca. 1940, Germanic religion is criticized as a defective evolute of IE religion, having lost the spiritual and overemphasized the martial function: this was at least partly a projection onto the past of the militarization of Germany in Dumézil’s own day."

"Dumezil was an entirely different sort of person from Pearson, Haudry, and de Benoist, infinitely more intelligent, decent, and much, much less crude. To the best of my knowledge, he had no dealings with Pearson, and over the years he maintained a cautiously ambiguous relation with the two others, both of whom courted him avidly ."

"Starting with "I think," Descartes fixed his attention only on the "think," completely neglecting the "I." Now, this I is essential. For Man, and consequently the Philosopher, is not only Consciousness, but also—and above all—Self-Consciousness. Man is not only a being that thinks—i.e., reveals Being by Logos, by Speech formed of words that have a meaning. He reveals in addition—also by Speech—the being that reveals Being, the being that he himself is, the revealing being that he opposes to the revealed being by giving it the name Ich or Selbst, I or Self."

"The being invested with authority is then necessarily an agent, and the authoritarian act is always an absolute (conscious and free) act. However, the authoritarian act is distinguished from all other acts by the fact that it does not encounter opposition from the person or persons towards whom it is directed. This in turn presupposes both the possibility of opposing it and the conscious and voluntary renunciation of realising this possibility."

"If, in order to make someone get out of my room, I have to use force, I have to change my own behaviour to realise the act in question, and I show through this behaviour that I have no authority; things are completely different if I do not move and this person leaves the room, that is to say, changes, as a result of my simply saying 'get out!' If the given order provokes a discussion, that is to say, forces the one who gives it to do something himself – namely engage in a discussion – as a function of this order, then there is no authority. And even less so if the discussion leads to giving up the order or even to a compromise, that is to say, precisely to changing the act that was supposed to provoke an outward change without itself changing."

"Given that God incarnates the summum of authority, it is no surprise that we find in the theological theory all the four pure types we have enumerated. God is for man 'Master' and 'Lord'. The Authority of the Master is therefore an integral element of global divine Authority. But God is also a 'Leader', the 'Lord of hosts' (Seboath), the political leader who guides his people while having knowledge in advance of their destinies. The element of the Authority of the Leader, therefore, is also involved in divine Authority. At the same time, 'divine Justice' is a religious category of primary importance, God being always conceived as the supreme Judge of man, as the sovereign embodiment of Justice and Equity: divine Authority integrates, therefore, also the element of the Authority of the Judge."

"God is always, more or less, a custodian God: He is some sort of a 'cause' to the social or political group that 'recognises' His Authority. He is the one who guarantees continuity ('filiation') – that is to say, the unity of the group – and fixes its 'personality', its 'individuality' (that is distinct from others), by determining its origin. Hence the 'traditional' character of the divinity of the (sacred) divine: God is always the God of ancestors ('the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob'). Hence also the (sacred) divine character of every 'tradition': the past that determines the present is generally reduced, eventually, to a divine origin."

"Obviously, absolute Authority in the strong sense of the word is never realised in fact. Only God is held to possess it."

"As for the Minority, its very existence proves that it does not recognise the Authority of the Majority, since forming a minority means precisely being opposed to the majority, and so 'reacting' (in one way or another) against its acts. But, where there is no Authority, 'reactions' can only be removed by force. Therefore, wherever the Majority claims a sui generis would-be 'Authority' resulting form its sheer number, it is in fact claiming pure and simple force. (A regime that is based purely and solely on a majority is a regime founded on force only. The 'majority' regime can therefore be contrasted with the 'authoritarian' one; the latter rests on Authority, while the former rests on force.)"

"True, since the Minority is necessarily weaker (physically, that is to say quantitatively) than the Majority, its power can only derive from its Authority (minority regimes are necessarily 'authoritarian'). But this Authority never derives from the fact that the Minority is a Minority. The 'justification' ('propaganda') is always of the kind: "even though we are only a minority, we . . ." The Authority that is endorsed by a Minority 'justifies' itself or explains itself by 'quality' and not by quantity. (Even the 'snob' claims to belong to the elite and not to the minority.)"

"The Authority of the 'man of the moment' pertains to the fact that it is he, par excellence, who represents 'actuality', the Present, the 'real presence' of something in the world (Hegel's Gegenwart), as opposed to the 'poetic' unreality of the past and the 'utopian' unreality of the future."

"It is from Eternity that the representatives of God on earth derive their Authority."

"There has to be a risk of the death sentence in order for 'mastery' to exist."

"In all times and ages, political crimes have always been punished more severely than others – even in the degenerate State of Nicholas II. The fact that in modern 'democracies' we lean towards political clemency proves only one thing: the loss of any sense of the 'political' in general."

"A Revolution is nothing other than the replacement of one given type of Authority with another."

"A brilliant Russian émigré who taught a highly influential series of seminars in Paris. Kojève had a major impact on the intellectual life of the continent. Among his students ranged such future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron."

"Kojève is the unknown Superior whose dogma is revered, often unawares, by that important subdivision of the "animal kingdom of the spirit" in the contemporary world—the progressivist intellectuals."

"Kojeve learned from Hegel that the philosopher seeks to know himself or to possess full self-consciousness, and that, therefore, the true philosophic endeavor is a coherent explanation of all things that culminates in the explanation of philosophy. The man who seeks any other form of knowledge, who cannot explain his own doings, cannot be called a philosopher."

"I think that we must not break off all contacts or interrupt the negotiations but, at the same time, we must not be naïve. We must understand that the objective of the negotiations for the North Koreans is to prolong the life of the regime. The longer they last, the more advantageous it is for them. But what concretely? Certainly, financial promises on the Western side in return for hot air, for promises which are more easily broken than made. I think that we must claim much more concrete services in return for the diplomatic recognition granted to the regime by the EU. Think of the system of labour camps where whole families live with their children. What crimes have been committed by those children who must experience and see cruelty every day? Their father or their mother is an alleged "opponent" to the regime, that is all. We must claim the release of children from the camps."

"‘White’ history is moribund; but the ‘whites’’ history is not."

"This ‘black history’ contests the explanation of the past that (as Marianne Cornevin showed) legitimized the tribalization of natives and their dispersal to the arbitrarily-defined ‘Homelands’, creating a moral and historical base for apartheid, while justifying the limited extent of the black ‘Homeland’ areas. As we know, in spite of their increasingly pressing and confident demands for the future, the blacks themselves have little opportunity, at least within the territory of South Africa itself, to affect the whites’ history, and to change its contents. Black history can only be written outside South Africa."

"In Black Africa, knowledge of history is the outcome of a threefold stratification. The oldest, oral tradition, works not only at the level of fact but also on that of myth – the legend of a Chaka, or of a Soundiata has as much reality as their real exploits, while a Torodo could identify with both the acts and the legend of El Hadj Omar. The second stratum is the history taught by the colonists. Finally, since independence, the work of African historians and today’s Africanists has resulted in a general, and still evolving, reevaluation of African history: their conclusions are expressed, for instance, in the journal Afrika Zamani and its results may be seen in the various new school-books of French-speaking Africa. They offer a ‘decolonized history’."

"Let us now follow these slaves, or their descendants, on the other side of the Atlantic in the West Indies, where the blacks, transplanted like the ‘Hindus’ who came from Asia in the nineteenth century, live together with Asians in Trinidad, Tobago or Jamaica, where they replaced the Caribs and Indians whom the first Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch colonists massacred."

"The mirror has been shattered. Universal history is dead; it died from being a European mirage, which reflected Europe’s own illusions as to her own destiny. The other peoples who figured in this history did so only in a transitory way when Europe chanced in their direction: Egypt, for instance, before the birth of Europe, then under Rome, and next with the Crusades or Bonaparte, Mehmet-Ali or Nasser. What is true of Egypt applies equally well to India, Armenia and the rest. Their history only counted when it crossed the path of ours."

"[Buddhism is] a Hindu phenomenon, a natural product, so to speak, of the age and social circle that witnessed its birth. When we attempt to reconstruct its primitive doctrine and early history, we come upon something so akin to what we meet in the most ancient Upanishads and in the legends of Brahmanism, that it is not always easy to determine what features belong peculiarly to it."

"Charity towards mankind as a whole, Hope in the future welfare of the human race, Faith in the possibility of furthering, through co-operation between nations, the cause of knowledge and culture, of everything that the eighteenth century, the most Anglo-French century in history, called by a fine name, "enlightenment"—Les Lumières. It is in this philosophical spirit that I mean to approach my difficult subject."

"Modern socialism is a doctrine with a double aspect... It is a doctrine of emancipation...and it is a doctrine of organisation."

"The Labour leaders are men whose doctrine requires them to make the state stronger, and whose good British instinct is to make the state as weak as possible."

"I can still hear Sidney Webb explaining to me that the future lay with the great administrative nations, where governing was done by the bureaucrats and order was maintained by the policemen."

"M. Brunschvicg has said of L'Angleterre en 1815 that it is not only a model of what an exhaustive study of a civilization should be: it is also a masterpiece of psychological insight. The praise is just. It is no wonder that English scholars, and the English public in general, have come to recognize Halévy as the great interpreter of nineteenth-century England."

"James Mill and Jeremy Bentham lived for him: Canning and Peel were his companions: the Wesleyans were not abstractions, but human flesh and blood. Above all, he had a justice and a balance in his views, and a clarity in his expression, which made him a master of exposition. Perhaps he had not eloquence, though he could lecture as few men can: perhaps he had not the gift of style, though he could say exactly, and with a rigorous economy of words, just what he wished to say. Such things would have been incompatible with the severe simplicity which was his essence. He had no artifices: he laboured simply to understand, and to set down simply his understanding. His book on the formation of philosophic radicalism, and the first volume of his history, are standing witnesses, and they are likely to be enduring witnesses, that he succeeded in his endeavour. His interpretation of English thought and English life, through all the long years from the youth of Bentham to the end of the World War, is one of the greatest gifts which the genius of France could have made to England, and it is a gift which English scholars will not forget."

"The first volume, England in 1815, a comprehensive and concise panoramic study, is widely regarded as Halévy's masterpiece. The book is unique in both conception and execution. I do not know of any other historical work which arrests the stream of history at a particular moment in time, in order to portray the whole condition of a society at one critical juncture. Nor does any other work come to mind which, to put it a little flatly perhaps, includes so much information in so manageable a compass... Whatever scholars may eventually decide about his interpretation, the descriptive aspects of the volume are not likely to be superseded."

"Halévy's account of foreign policy, however, is, in my opinion, the weakest aspect of his History... [I]t remains true that Halévy's innate distaste for power politics growing out of his general dislike for the factor of force in public affairs did prevent him from treating diplomacy with the sympathetic penetration that characterized his discussion of internal problems."

"Professor E. Halévy is best known in England for his Historie du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, the first volume of which appeared in 1913. English critics generally agreed that it ranked among the best histories of the period."

"In the first ardor of their discoveries, the orientalists proclaimed that, in its entirety, an antiquity more profound, more philosophical, and more poetical than that of Greece and Rome was emerging from the depths of Asia. [One that promised] a new Reformation of the religious and secular world. This is the great subject in philosophy today."

"When human revolutions first began, India stood more expressly than any other country for what may be called a Declaration of the Rights of the Being. That divine Individuality, and its community with infmity, is obviously the foundation and the source of all life and all history."

"India made, more loudly than anyone, what we might call the “declaration of the rights of the Being.” There, in this divine self, in this society of the infinite with itself, lies clearly the foundation, the root of all life and all history."

"The central Post Office in Lahore was flooded with thousands of postcards addressed to Hindus and Sikhs. They depicted men and women being raped and slaughtered. . On the back was the message : “ This is what is happening to our Sikh and Hindu brothers and sisters at the hands of the Moslems when they take over ..."

"The gutters of Lahore were running red with blood. The beautiful Paris of the Orient was a vista of desolation and destruction. Whole streets of Hindu homes were ablaze while Moslem police and troops stood by watching. At night, the sounds of looters ransacking those homes seemed to Atkins like the crunch of termites boring into logs."

"In Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, Hindu moneylenders, shopkeepers and zamindars (Sikh landlords) would disappear… if Pakistan is ours, so too are shops, farms, houses and factories of the Hindus and Sikhs."

"You are right to believe in the goodness of people. Keep doing what you do; working hard, loving, laughing, forgiving and doing your bit might not change the whole world, but it will change you for the best."

"Diversity isn’t just having a black person here and there. It’s about where they can have some kind of influence and power, and have a say in how things should run."

"You should never hand over a country to one man, whoever the man, whatever the circumstances."

"It [a republic] is the form of government which divides us the least."

"Thiers was the savage, limited type of bourgeois who steeps himself in blood without flinching."

"What do you expect me to think of Thiers? There's no one who detested me more... Thiers was a man who firmly abstained from having an idea, who literally had no perception of anything. During the Commune he did the same as he had done in the Rue Transonain, and with the same ferocity. And not only did he do it, but he boasted and crowed about it. Did I tell you about the abominable act he committed? After having promised to leave the Parisians their guns, he took them away—which was the cause of everything that happened... He was one of those hide-bound fools who fancy that you can achieve something with an order written on a piece of paper."

"It fell to the liberal statesman, academician, and historian Adolphe Thiers to forge this broader synthesis in his Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1845–1862). Begun under the July Monarchy, continued under the Republic, and concluded under the Second Empire, this 20-volume work sold more than a million copies, and established Thiers' reputation as France's "national historian" (as well as his fortune). The author was supremely well placed to produce such a work. From his early years at school in Marseilles he had been fascinated by Napoleon, and like many men of his generation his obsession with the Emperor continued well into his adult life. Bringing back Napoleon's remains for burial in Paris had been his idea, although he was out of office by the time the cendres were returned to Paris."

"He was...an intellectual lightweight. This is apparent in his voluminous histories of the Revolution, Consulate and Empire. He boasted that his books were the sensation of his century. Perhaps, but they are no longer read in our own. Thiers offered a well written, sometimes dramatic, narrative undistinguished by its depth of analysis. Intellectual or socio-economic influences upon history are absent from his work. His originality lay with the fact that he was the first to write of France's recent past in relatively dispassionate terms, not an easy task in his day, although he was unable to stifle his great admiration for Napoleon."

"The virtues and vices of a people, at the time when any revolution happens in their government, are the measure of the liberty or slavery which they ought to expect. An heroic love for the public good, a profound reverence for the laws, a contempt of riches, and a noble haughtiness of the soul, are the only foundation of a free government; and on the contrary, indifference for the public good, a servile dread of the laws, the love of riches, and sordid grovelling sentiments are, as it were, so many chains to fetter a people in slavery."

"May any Muslims who happen to read these lines forgive my plain speaking. For them the Koran is the book of Allah and I respect their faith. But I do not share it and I do not wish to fall back, as many orientalists have done, on equivocal phrases to disguise my real meaning. This may perhaps be of assistance in remaining on good terms with individuals and governments professing Islam; but I have no wish to deceive anyone. Muslims have every right not to read the book or to acquaint themselves with the ideas of a non-Muslim, but if they do so, they must expect to find things put forward there which are blasphemous to them. It is evident that I do not believe that the Koran is the book of Allah."

"In the high plateau of eastern Iran, in the oases of Serindia, in the arid wastes of Tibet, Mongolia, and Manchuria, in the ancient civilized lands of China and Japan, in the lands of the primitive Mons and Khmers and other tribes of India-China, in the countries of the Malaya-Polynesians, in Indonesia and Malay, India left the indelible impress of her high culture, not only upon religion, but also upon art, and literature, in a word, all the higher things of spirit..."

"There is an obstinate prejudice thanks to which India is constantly represented as having lived, as it were, hermetically sealed up in its age-old civilization, apart from the rest of Asia. Nothing could be more exaggerated. During the first eight centuries of our era, so far as religion and art are concerned, central Asia was a sort of Indian colony. It is often forgotten that in the early Middle Ages there existed a ‘Greater India,’ a vast Indian empire. A man coming from the Ganges or the Deccan to Southeast Asia felt as much at home there as in his own native land. In those days the Indian Ocean really deserved its name."

"Universal art has succeeded in few materialization of the Divine as powerful and also as balanced. ... the greatest representation of the pantheistic god created by the hands of man.... Never have the overflowing sap of life, the pride of force superior to everything, the secret intoxication of the inner god of things been so serenely expressed.""The three countenances of the one being are here harmonized without a trace of effort. There are few material representations of the divine principle at once as powerful and as well balanced as this in the art of the whole world. Nay, more, here we have undoubtedly the grandest representation of the pantheistic God ever made by the hand of man .. .Indeed, never have the exuberant vigor of life, the tumult of universal joy expressing itself in ordered harmony, the pride of a power superior to any other, and the secret exaltation of the divinity immanent in all things found such serenely expressed.""

"Whether he be surrounded or not by the flamming aureole of the Tiruvasi (Pabhamandala) - the circle of the world which he both fills and oversteps - the King of the Dance is all rhythm and exaltation. The tambourine, which he sounds with one of his right hands, draws all creatures into this rhytmic motion and they dance in his company. The conventionalized locks of flying hair and the blown scarfs tell of the speed of this universal movement, which crystallizes matter and reduces it to powder in turn. One of his left hands holds the fire, which animates and devours the worlds in this cosmic whirl. One of the God's feet is crushing a Titan, for "this dance is danced upon the bodies of the dead", yet one of the right hands is making a gesture of reassurance (abhayamudra), so true it is that, seen from the cosmic point of view ... the very cruelty of this universal determinism is kindly, as the generative principle of the future. And, indeed, on more than one of our bronzes the King of the Dance wears a broad smile. He smiles at death and at life, at pain and at joy, alike, or rather, his smile is death and life, both joy and pain ... From this lofty point of view, in fact, all things fall mto their place, finding their explanation and logical compulsion. Here art is the faithful interpreter of a philosophical concept. The plastic beauty of the rhythm is no more than the expression of an ideal rhythm. The very multiplicity of arms, puzzling as it may seem at first sight, is subject in tum to an inward law, each pair remaining a model of elegance in itself, so that the whole being of the Nataraja thrills with a magnificent harmony in his terrible joy. And as though to stress the point that the dance of the divine actor is indeed a sport, (lila) - the sport of life and death, the sport of creation and destruction, at once infinite and purposeless - the first of the left hands hangs limply from the arm in the careless gesture of the gajahasta (hand as the elephant's trunk). And lastly, as we look at the back view of the statue, are not the steadiness of these shoulders which uphold world, and the majesty of this Jove-like torso, as it were a symbol of the stability and immutability of substance, while the gyration of the legs in its dizzy speed would seem to symbolize the vortex of phenomena."

"These myths were steeped in erudition, informed by profound knowledge of Hebrew and Sanskrit, fortified by comparative study of linguistic data, mythology, and religion, and shaped by the effort to relate linguistic structures, forms of thought, and features of civilization. Yet they were also myths, fantasies of the social imagination, at every level. The com­ parative philology of the most ancient languages was a quest for origins, an attempt to return to a privileged moment in time when God, man, and natural forces still lived in mutual transparency. This plunge into the distant past in search of "roots" went hand in hand with a never forgotten faith in a meaningful history, whose course, guided by the Providence of the one God, could be understood only in the light of Christian revelation. As scholars established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo-European studies, they also invented the mythical figures of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a providential pair which, by revealing to the people of the Christianized West the secret of their identity, also bestowed upon them the patent of nobility that justified their spiritual, religious, and political domination of the world. 5-6"

"I pour upon the earth of the tomb," says Iphigenia in Euripides, "milk, honey, and wine; for it is with these that we rejoice the dead." ...[The associated] ceremony was still performed in the time of Plutarch, who was enabled to witness the six hundredth anniversary of it. A little later, Lucian, ridiculing these opinions and usages, shows how deeply rooted they were in the common mind. "The dead," says he, "are nourished by the provisions which we place upon their tomb, and drink the wine which we pour out there; so "that one of the dead to whom nothing is offered is condemned to perpetual hunger."

"The sacred fire was the Providence of the family. The worship was very simple. The first rule was, that there should always be upon the altar a few live coals for if this fire was extinguished a god ceased to exist. At certain moments of the day they placed upon the fire diy herbs and wood; then the god manifested himself in a bright flame. They offered sacrifices to him; and the essence of every sacrifice was to sustain and reanimate the sacred fire, to nourish and develop the body of the god. This was the reason why they gave him wood before everything else; for the same reason they afterwards poured out wine upon the altar, — the inflammable wine of Greece, — oil, incense, and the fat of victims. The god received these offerings, and devoured them; radiant with satisfaction, he rose above the altar, and lighted up the worshipper with his brightness. Then was the moment to invoke him; and the hymn of prayer went out from the heart of man."

"It is a strong proof of the antiquity of this belief, and of these practices, to find them at the same time among men on the shores of the Mediterranean and among those of the peninsula of India. Assuredly the Greeks did not borrow this religion from the Hindus, nor the Hindus from the Greeks. But the Greeks, the Italians, and the Hindus belonged to the same race; their ancestors, in a very distant past, lived together in Central Asia. There this creed originated and these rites were established. The religion of the sacred fire dates, therefore, from the distant and dim epoch when there were yet no Greeks, no Italians, no Hindus; when there were only Aryas. When the tribes separated they carried this worship with them, some to the banks of the Ganges, others to the shores of the Mediterranean. Later, when these tribes had no intercourse with each other, some adored Brahma, others Zeus, and still others Janus; each group chose its own gods; but all preserved, as an ancient legacy, the first religion which they had known and practiced in the common cradle of their race."

"The symbols of this religion became modified in the course of ages. When the people of Greece and Italy began to represent their gods as persons, and to give each one a proper name and a human form, the old worship of the hearth-fire submitted to the common law which human intelligence, in that period, imposed upon every religion. The altar of the sacred fire was personified. They called it Vesta; the name was the same in Latin and in Greek, and was the same that in the common and primitive language designated an altar. By a process frequent enough, a common noun had become a proper name. By degrees a legend was formed. They pictured this divinity to themselves as wearing a female form, because the word used for altar was of the feminine gender. They even went so far as to represent this goddess in statues. Still they could never efface the primitive belief, according to which this divinity was simply the fire upon the altar and Ovid himself was forced to admit that Vesta was nothing else than a "living flame." If we compare this worship of the sacred fire with the worship of the dead, of which wo have already spoken, we shall perceive a close relation between them. ...It is a chaste fire; the union of the sexes must be removed far from its presence. They pray to it not only for riches and health, but also for purity of heart, temperance, and wisdom. "Render us rich and flourishing," says an Orphic hymn; " make us also wise and chaste." ...Still later, when they made the great Vesta of this myth of the sacred fire, Vesta was the virgin goddess. She represented in the world neither fecundity nor power; she was order, but not rigorous, abstract, mathematical order, the imperious and unchangeable law, which was early perceived in physical nature. She was moral order. They imagined her as a sort of universal soul, which regulated the different movements of worlds, as the human soul keeps order in the human system. Thus are we permitted to look into the way of thinking of primitive generations. The principle of this worship is outside of physical nature, and is found in this little mysterious world, this microcosm — man."

"The ancient family was a religious rather than a natural association and we shall see presently that the wife was counted in the family only after the sacred ceremony of marriage had initiated her into the worship that the son was no longer counted in it when he had renounced the worship, or had been emancipated; that, on the other hand, an adopted son was counted a real son, because, though he had not the ties of blood, he had something better —a community of worship; that the heir who refused to adopt the worship of this family had no right to the succession; and, finally, that relationship and the right of inheritance were governed not by birth, but by the rights of participation in the worship, such as religion had established them. Religion, it is true, did not create the family; but certainly it gave the family its rules; and hence it comes that the constitution of the ancient family was so different from what it would have been if it had owed its foundation to natural affection. The ancient Greek language has a very significant word to designate a family... a word which signifies, literally, that which is near a hearth. A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire, and to offer the funeral repast to the same ancestors."

"We should not lose sight of the excessive difficulty which, in primitive times, opposed the foundation of regular societies. The social tie was not easy to establish between those human beings who were so diverse, so free, so inconstant. To bring them under the rules of a community, to institute commandments and insure obedience, to cause passion to give way to reason, and individual right: to public right, there certainly was something necessary, stronger than material force, more respectable than interest, surer than a philosophical theory, more unchangeable than a convention; something that should dwell equally in all hearts, and should be all-powerful there. This power was a belief. Nothing has more power over the soul. A belief is the work of our mind, but we are not on that account free to modify it at will. It is our own creation, but we do not know it. It is human, and we believe it a god. It is the effect of our power, and is stronger than we are. It is in us; it does not quit us: it speaks to us at every moment. If it tells us to obey, we obey; if it traces duties for us, we submit. Man may, indeed, subdue nature, but he is subdued by his own thoughts."

"The causes of ... [the city's] destruction may be reduced to two. One was the change that took place in the course of time in ideas, resulting from the natural development of the human mind, and which, in effacing ancient beliefs, at the same time caused the social edifice to crumble, which these beliefs had built, and could alone sustain. The other was a class of men who found themselves placed outside this city organization, and who suffered from it. These men had an interest in destroying it, and made war upon it continually. When, therefore, the beliefs, on which this social regime was founded, became weakened, and the interests of the majority of men were at war with it, the system fell. No city escaped this law of transformation; Sparta no more than Athens, Rome no more than Greece. We have seen that the men of Greece and those of Italy had originally the same beliefs, and that the same series of institutions was developed among both; and we shall now see that all these cities passed through similar revolutions."

"The ancient city, like all human society, had ranks, distinctions, and inequalities. We know the distinction originally made at Athens between the Eupatnids and the Thetes; at Sparta we find the class of Equals and that of the Inferiors; and in Euboea, that of the Knights and that of the People. The history of Rome is full, of the struggles between the Patricians and Plebeians, struggles that we find in all the Sabine, Latin, and Etruscan cities. We can even remark that the higher we ascend in the history of Greece and, Italy the more profound and the more strongly marked the distinction appears — a positive proof that the inequality did not grow up with time, but that it existed from the beginning, and that it was contemporary with the birth of cities."

"Now, before the day on which the city was founded, the family already contained within itself this distinction of classes. Indeed, the family was never dismembered; it was indivisible, like the primitive religion of the hearth. The oldest son alone, succeeding the father, took possession, of the priesthood, the property, and the authority, and his brothers were to him what they had been to their father. From generation to generation, from first-born to first-born, there was never but one family chief. He presided at the sacrifice, repeated the prayer, pronounced judgment, and governed. To him alone originally belonged the title of pater; for this word, which signified power, and not paternity, could be applied only to the chief of the family. His sons, his brothers, his servants, all called him by this title. Here, then, in the inner constitution of the family is the first principle of inequality. The oldest is the privileged one for the worship, for the succession, and for command. After several centuries, there were naturally formed, in each of these great families, younger branches, that were, according to religion and by custom, inferior to the older branch, and who, living under its protection, submitted to its authority."

"When the kings had been everywhere over-thrown, and the aristocracy had become supreme, the people did not content themselves with regretting the monarchy; they aspired to restore it under a new form. In Greece, during the sixth century, they succeeded generally in procuring leaders; not wishing to call them kings, because this title implied the idea of religious functions, and could only be borne by the sacerdotal families, they called them tyrants. Whatever might have been the original sense of this word, it certainly was not borrowed from the language of religion. Men could not apply it to the gods as they applied the word king; they did not pronounce it in their prayers. It designated, in fact, something quite new among men—an authority that was not derived from the worship, a power that religion had not established. The appearance of this word in the Greek language marks a principle which the preceding generations had not known—the obedience of man to man. Up to that time there had been no other chiefs of the state than those who had been chiefs of religion; those only governed the city who offered the sacrifices and invoked the gods for it. In obeying them, men obeyed only the religious law, and made no act of submission except to the divinity. Obedience to a man, authority given to this man by other men, a power human in its origin and nature—this had been unknown to the ancient Eupatrids, and was never thought of till the day when the inferior orders threw off the yoke of the aristocracy and attempted a new government."

"Thus the ancient city was transformed by degrees. In the beginning it was an association of some hundred chiefs of families. Later the number of citizens increased, because the younger branches obtained a position of equality. Later still, the freed clients, the plebs, all that multitude which during centuries had remained outside the political and religious association, sometimes even outside the sacred enclosure of the city, broke down the barriers which were opposed to them, and penetrated into the city, where they immediately became the masters."

"[I]t does not appear that these men aspired at first to share the laws and rights of the patricians. Perhaps they thought, with the patricians themselves, that there could "be nothing in common between the two orders. No one thought of civil and political equality. That the plebeians could raise themselves to the level of the patricians, never entered the minds of the plebeian of the first centuries any more than it occurred to the patricians. ...[T]hese men seem to have preferred, at first, complete separation. In Rome they found no remedy for their sufferings; they saw but one means of escaping from their inferiority — this was to depart from Rome. ...In view of such an act the senate was divided in opinion. The more ardent of the patricians showed clearly that the departure of the plebs was far from afflicting them.. Thenceforth the patricians alone would remain at Rome with the clients that were still faithful to them. Rome would renounce its future grandeur, but the patricians would be masters there. They would no longer have these plebeians to trouble them, to whom the rules of ordinary government could not be applied, and who were an embarrassment to the city. ...But others, less faithful to old principles, or solicitous for the grandeur of Rome, were afflicted at the departure of the plebs. Rome would lose half its soldiers. What would become of it in the midst of the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans — all enemies? The plebs had good qualities; why could not these be made use of for the interests of the city? These senators desired, therefore, at a cost of a few concessions, of which they did not perhaps see all the consequences, to bring back to the city those thousands of arms that made the strength of the legions. On the other side, the plebs perceived, at the end of a few months, that they could not live upon the Sacred Mount. They procured, indeed, what was materially necessary for existence, but all that went to make up an organized society was wanting. They could not found a city there, because they could not find a priest who knew how to perform the religious ceremony of the foundation. They could not elect magistrates, for they had no prytaneum with its perpetual fire, where the magistrate might sacrifice. They could find no foundation for social laws, since the only laws of which men then had any idea were derived from the patrician religion. In a word, they had not among them the elements of a city. The plebs saw clearly that by being more independent they were not happier; that they did not form a more regular society than at Rome; and that the problem, whose solution was so important to them, was not solved. ...It was found, therefore, that the plebs and patricians, though they had almost nothing in common, could not live without each other. They came together and concluded a treaty of alliance. This treaty appears to have been made on the same terms as those which terminate a war between two different peoples. Plebeians and patricians were indeed neither the same people nor the same city. By this treaty the patrician did not agree that the plebeian should make a part of the religious and political city; it does not appear that the plebs demanded it. They agreed merely that in the future the plebs, having been organized into something like a regular society, should have chiefs taken from their own number. This is the origin of the tribuneship of the plebs — an entirely new institution, which resembled nothing that the city had known before."

"[The Plebeian] assemblies did not at first occupy themselves with the general interests of the city; they named no magistrates, and passed no laws. They deliberated only on the interests of their own order, named the plebeian chiefs, and carried plebiscita. There was at Rome, for a long time, a double series of decrees — senatusconsulta for the patricians, plebiscita for the plebs. The plebs did not obey the senatusconsulta, nor the patricians the plebiscita. There were two peoples at Rome. These two peoples, always in presence of each other, and living within the same walls, still had almost nothing in common. A plebeian could not be consul of the city, nor a patrician tribune of the plebs. The plebeian did not enter the assembly by curies, nor the patrician the assembly of the tribes. They were two peoples that did not even understand each other, not having — so to speak — common ideas. If the patrician spoke in the name of religion and the laws, the plebeian replied that he did not know this hereditary religion, or the laws that flowed from it. If the patrician alleged a sacred custom, the plebeian replied in the name of the law of nature. They reproached each other with injustice; each was just according to his own principles, and unjust according to the principles and beliefs of the other. The assembly of the curies and the reunion of the patres seemed to the plebeian odious privileges. In the assembly of the tribes the patrician saw a meeting condemned by religion. The consulship was for the plebs an arbitrary and tyrannical authority; the tribuneship, in the eyes of the patrician, was something impious, abnormal, contrary to all principles; be could not understand this sort of chief, who was not a priest, and who was elected without auspices. The tribuneship deranged the sacred order of the city; it was what a heresy is in religion — the public worship was destroyed. "The gods will be against us," said a patrician, "so long as we have among us this ulcer, which is eating us up, and which extends its corruption to the whole social body." ...The duality of the Roman population became from day to day more manifest."

"The upper classes among the ancients never had intelligence or ability enough to direct the poor towards labor, and thus help them to escape honorably from their misery and corruption. A few benevolent men attempted it, but they did not succeed. The result was that the cities always floated between two revolutions, one to despoil the rich, the other to enable them to recover their fortunes. This lasted from the Peloponnesian war to the conquest of Greece by the Romans."

"In every city the rich and the poor were two enemies living by the side of each other, the one coveting wealth, and the other seeing their wealth coveted. 'No relation, no service, no labor united them. The poor could acquire wealth only by despoiling the rich. The lich could defend their property only by extreme skill or by force. They regarded each other with the eyes of hate. There was a double conspiracy in every city the poor conspired from cupidity, the rich from fear. Aristotle says the rich took the following oath among themselves: "I swear always to remain the enemy of the people, and to do them all the injury in my power." It is impossible to say which of the two parties committed the most cruelties and crimes. Hati-ed effaced in their hearts every sentiment of humanity. There was at Miletus a war between the rich and the poor. At first the latter were successful, and drove the rich from the city; but afterwards, regretting that they had not been able to slaughter them, they took their children, collected them into some threshing-floors, and had them trodden to death under the feet of oxen. The rich afterwards returned to the city, and became masters of it. They took, in their turn, the children of the poor, covered them with pitch, and burnt them alive. What, then, became of the democracy? They were not precisely responsible for these excesses and crimes; still they were the first to be affected by them. There were no longer any governing rules; now, the democracy could live only under the strictest and best onserved rules. We no longer see any government, but merely factions in power. The magistrate no longer exercised his integrity for the benefit of peace and law, but for the interests and greed of a party. A command no longer had a legitimate title or a sacred character; there was no longer anything voluntary in obedience; always forced, it was always waiting for an opportunity to take its revenge."

"When this poor class, after several civil wars, saw that victories gained them nothing, that the opposite party always returned to power, and that, after many interchanges of confiscations and restitutions the struggle always recommenced, they dreamed of establishing a monarchical government which should conform to their interests, and which, by forever suppressing the opposite party, should assure them, for the future, the fruits of their victory. And so they set up tyrants. From that moment the parties changed names; they were no longer aristocracy or democracy; they fought for liberty or for tyranny. Under these two names wealth and poverty were still at war. Liberty signified the government where the rich had the rule, and defended their fortunes; tyranny indicated exactly the contrary. It is a general fact, and almost without exception in the history of Greece and of Italy, that the tyrants sprang from the popular party, and had the aristocracy as enemies. “The mission of the tyrant,” says Aristotle, “is to protect the people against the rich; he has always commenced by being a demagogue, and it is the essence of tyranny to oppose the aristocracy.” “The means of arriving at a tyranny,” he also says, “is to gain the confidence of the multitude, and one does this by declaring himself the enemy of the rich. This was the course of Peisistratus at Athens, of Theagenes at Megara, and of Dionysius at Syracuse.” The tyrant always made war upon the rich. At Megara, Theagenes surprises the herds of the rich in the country and slaughters them. At Comae, Aristodemus abolishes debts, and takes the lands of the rich to give them to the poor. ...They could maintain their power only while they satisfied the cravings of the multitude, and administered to their passions."

"The primitive religion, whose symbols were the immovable stone of the hearth, and the ancestral tomb, — a religion which had established the ancient family, and had afterwards organized the city, —changed with time, and grew old. ...Men began to have an idea of immaterial nature; the notion of the human soul became more definite, and almost at the same time that of a divine intelligence sprang up in their minds. Could they still believe in the divinities of the primitive ages, of those dead men who lived in the tomb, of those Lares who had been men, of those holy ancestors whom it was necessary to continue to nourish with food? Such a faith became impossible. ...Some believed in annihilation, others in a second and entirely spiritual existence in a world of spirits. In these cases they no longer admitted that the dead lived in the tomb, supporting themselves upon offerings. They also began to have too high an idea of the divine to persist in believing that the dead were gods. On the contrary, they imagined the soul going to seek its recompense in the Elysian Fields, or going to pay the penalty of its crimes; and by a notable progress, they no longer deified any among men... [T]he Lares and Heroes [had] lost the adoration of all who thought. As to the sacred fire, which appears to have had no significance, except so far as it was connected with the worship of the dead, that also lost its prestige. Men continued to have a domestic fire in the house, to salute it, to adore it, and to offer it libations; but this was now only a customary worship, which faith no longer vivified. [Analogously], [t]he public hearth of the city, or prytaneum, ...they had forgotten...[,] represented the invisible life of the national ancestors, founders, and heroes. ...At the same time a few great sanctuaries, like those of Delphi and Delos, attracted men, and made them forget their local worship. The mysteries and the doctrines which these taught accustomed them to disdain the empty and meaningless religion of the city. ... Then philosophy appeared, and [finally] overthrew all the rules of the ancient polity."

"This right of citizenship then became precious, first, because it was complete, and secondly, because it was a privilege. Through it a man figured in the comitia of the most powerful city of Italy; he might be consul and commander of the legions. There was also the means of satisfying more modest ambitions; thanks to this right, one might ally himself, by marriage, to a Roman family; or he might take up his abode at Rome, and become a proprietor there; or he might carry on trade in Rome, which had already become one of the first commercial towns in the world. One might enter the company of farmers of the revenue, —that is to say, take a part in the enormous profits which accrued from the collection of the revenue, or from speculations in the lauds of the ager publicus. Wherever one lived, he was effectually protected; he escaped the authority of the municipal magistrate and was sheltered from the caprices of the Roman magistrates themselves. By being a citizen of Rome, a man gained honor, wealth, and security. The Latins, therefore, became eager to obtain this title, and used all sorts of means to acquire it."

"We do not see that all Greece, or even a Greek city, formally asked for this right of citizenship, so much desired; but men worked individually to acquire it, and Rome bestowed it with a good grace.' Some obtained it through the favor of the emperor; others bought it. It was granted to those who had three children, or who served in certain divisions of the army. An easy and prompt means of acquiring it was to sell one's self as a slave to a Roman citizen, for the act of freeing him according to legal forms conferred the right of citizenship. One who had the title of Roman citizen no longer formed a part of his native city, either civilly or politically. He could continue to live there, but he was considered an alien, he was no longer subject to the laws of the city, he no longer obeyed its magistrates, no longer supported its pecuniary burdens. This was a consequence of the old principle, which did not permit a man to belong to two cities at the same time."

"The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here."

"The two premodern religions were ancestor worship and nature worship (see "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges). The two postmodern religions are evidently identitarianism and environmentalism. Is this a coincidence, or something deeper?"

"The most fundamental lesson of Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City is a very difficult one to take in: social order results from unanimously shared belief in the origins of that social order. To the extent to which such belief is weakened, it is supplemented by force or wealth, which in turn both further weaken unanimity, and are themselves undermined by the counter-force or the demand for equal distribution of the wealth that has been generated. But shared belief in the origin of social order creates distinctions between those who inherit more, and those who inherit less, or not at all, from property traced back to that origin."

"Naming (“christening,” “deeming”) is more than a performative moral act; it is linguistic and aesthetic as well. Identifying the emergence and establishment of anti-sacrificial moral practices will take on a form distinctive to a particular social order; the consolidation of the originary “belief” or gesture should therefore be represented in ways that make it inseparable from the entirety of that order. Naming commemorates earlier establishments of practices of deferral, and by enhancing the self-referentiality of the social order as a whole makes it impossible to think outside of that order. It should be kept in mind that all social orders do this—orders in the liberal tradition simply deny they are doing so, and therefore do it haphazardly and in violent fits and starts. Every social order, however small or transient, develops its own “idiom,” because any exchange of signs involves the respective participants taking up the words, phrases and expressions of the others for both phatic purposes and as a “multiplier” of meanings—if I repeat what another has said with slight changes in wording and tone, I not only say what I have said, but create a complex relationship between what I have said and what the other has said (and whatever others he was responding to have said—and left unsaid), a relationship that remains largely tacit but all the more difficult to shake or exit for that very reason."

"It is along these lines, I propose, that the unquestioned belief in communal origin, without which, as Coulanges shows, we face a more or less accelerated descent into a violence that is not only physical but creeps into our habits, our interaction, our very language, is possible."

"Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization."

"Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds."

"We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire."

"She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others."

"Not being able to read in the book of history, which shows that democracy degenerates everywhere into despotism, it undertook to establish democracy in France . . . thus it dared to fight in every way the two foundations of all societies, authority and inequality; inequality which is the obvious basis of all activity and fecundity in social life; which is at the same time the mother and the daughter of liberty, since equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue . . . . . . No, property, the last religion of bastard societies, cannot resist alone the onslaught of the levellers. Have we not seen in our days that the privileges even of intellect have been challenged, and that appeals have been made to ignorance in order to save the revolution? It cannot be doubted that the dogma of equality, quite logically, should not respect merit or wealth more than birth."

"War without fire is worth nothing—like sausages without mustard."

"Igitur infra supradictum millesimum tercio iam fere imminente anno, contigit in uniuerso pene terrarum orbe, precipue tamen in Italia et in Galliis, innouari ecclesiarum basilicas, licet plereque decenter locate minime indiguissent, emulabatur tamen queque gens christicolarum aduersus alteram decentiore frui. Erat enim instar ac si mundus ipse excutiendo semet, reiecta uetustate, passim candidam ecclesiarum uestem indueret."

"The 'problem' is primarily in the head of Indo-Europeanists: It is a problem of interpretative logic and ideology. We have seen that one primarily places the lE's in the north if one is German, . . . in the east if one is Russian, and in the middle if, being Italian or Spanish, one has no chance of competing for the privilege."

"We do not find any evidence for the diffusion of the entire material culture of the steppes to those regions where historically attested Indo-European languages were spoken"

"While no one would dream of questioning the resemblances between the various so-called Indo-European languages, the centrifugal arborescent model in its current forms cannot be considered as validated due to the numerous contradictions that it contains. Furthermore, abuses, both past and present, of this model should incite us to the utmost rigor. We must therefore turn toward much more complex and multidisciplinary models concerning historical phenomena that span millennia if we are to meaningfully explore the multiplicity of problems that make up the “Indo-European question.”"

"The past and present exploitation by nationalist and extremist movements of the canonical Indo-European model of an original People who emerged from an original Homeland is a magnified reflection of the ideological representations that are underpinned by this model."

"The model of diffusion of “archaeological cultures,” each corresponding to a given “people,” is both naturalist and directly inspired by the nation states of the nineteenth century; it does not correspond to numerous situations provided, for example, by the ethnology of other continents or by the history and archaeology of protohistoric peoples of Early Medieval Europe."

"The idea of a single, localized, original Homeland (Urheimat) which was the cradle of the original People is just one of the possible hypotheses that might account for the similarities between the Indo-European languages."

"We will now turn our attention to the two other principal hypotheses, both migrationist and both with a long history (although regularly updated): on the one hand, a Near Eastern origin linked to the arrival of Neolithic colonists, and, on the other, an origin in the steppes to the north of the Black Sea. We will see that the difficulties which they pose ought to prompt us to question the overly simplistic model on which they are both founded."

"It is presumptuous to say the least to claim that the migratory routes traveled by the Indo-Europeans from their original Homeland have now been clearly traced."

"This controversial scholar, the first translator of Darwin and by extension the first promoter of “social Darwinism” in France, stated in her preface to the Origine des espèces that the most courageous “races” had overcome the others since “man, having become the stronger, could impose himself on the mate that pleased him most; and hence woman, who had nothing to do but please and submit, became more and more beautiful, in accordance with man’s ideal, man who himself became even stronger, having only to fight, command, and protect.” Thus we see the “reckless and blind” error of Christianity and democracy which scorned natural selection: “while all care, all devotions of love and pity are considered to be owed to the deposed and degenerate representatives of the species, there is nothing to encourage the development of the emerging force or to propagate merit, talent and virtue.”"

"There is a degree of coherence when, in the context of the Indo-European question, such robust biological racism is associated with a thesis that is both Euro-centrist and migrationist; this is in contrast to Broca’s “entrenched” anti-linguistic autochtonism. In the opinion of Clémence Royer, “a race that is powerful enough to overrun all of Europe and all of western Asia cannot have had its origins in a Pamirian valley; mountain peoples are peoples who have retreated and defend themselves; they are never conquering peoples.” Yet “the blond European race, as a whole, appears to have always been a race of travelers, a race that is essentially war-like and conquering.” “In the end, these high plateaus of Asia can be discounted; once we wanted to believe that these plateaus were the birthplace of everything but all they have ever given rise to are avalanches.”"

"In his “Que sais-je?” on the Indo-Europeans, which is a follow-on to a first volume almost entirely devoted to Indo-European linguistics, Jean Haudry describes an ideal proto Indo-European society, which for the most part belongs to the realm of fantasy as becomes more and more obvious as the book progresses."

"Without exaggeration and in a definitive reply to Momigliano (who paradoxically was a member of the Italian Fascist Party before having to flee Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws) and Ginzburg, we can state that Dumézil was not a Nazi supporter in the 1930s. He was, however, a fascist in the precise meaning of the term."

"In 1973, Pearson, through the intermediary of the Institute for the Study of Man, founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, which would rapidly become a leading reference in the field. The editorial committee was comprised of four members: Roger Pearson himself, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Finnish linguist Raimo Anttila, and Belgian Indo-Europeanist Edgar Polomé. Incidentally, Polomé, Pearson and Gimbutas were also part of the patronage committee of Nouvelle École. Assuredly, the scientific standing of these three scholars is indisputable, as is that of most of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, which initially numbered thirty-six members. However, in their midst we once again encounter Franz Altheim, Himmler’s collaborator, who was also on the patronage committee of Nouvelle École; indeed several other members, such as Mircea Eliade, Scott Littleton, and Rüdiger Schmitt, belonged to both committees, and it is not always possible to ascertain if these scientists were fully aware of the nature of the journal."

"In the postwar years, British anthropologist Roger Pearson founded the Northern League for North European Friendship, which brought together former Nazis, like raciologist Hans Günther (who at the time was writing under a pseudonym); former SS member Arthur Ehrhardt; Franz Altheim, one time collaborator of Himmler within the Ahnenerbe (after the war he held a professorship at Halle in East Germany and then in West Berlin); and various neo-Nazis and neo-fascists such as Colin Jordan, Alastair Harper, and John Tyndall in Great Britain. In 1960, Pearson established the Mankind Quarterly journal, the mouthpiece of “scientific racism,” in collaboration with Robert Gayre and, most notably, with Nazi geneticist Ottmar von Verschuer, Mengele’s former superior."

"Which components of the reconstructed Indo-European proto-culture can be used as evidence of a steppic location?... two arguments are generally singled out by the proponents of the steppic theory: the case of the horse and that of the chariot. The domesticated horse, on the one hand, and the chariot on the other, are supposedly well-attested in the shared vocabulary and are particularly valorized in the earliest Indo-European mythologies, where the sacrifice of a horse is the ultimate royal sacrifice... The most common root for the horse is certainly found in a significant number of Indo-European languages... Its absence in Slavic is all the more surprising since the historical “cradle” of the Slavs is often said to be located in the North Pontic Steppes, or close by, precisely where the earliest domestication of the horse is reputed to have occurred."

"The Sintashta culture, revealed by excavations carried out over the past three decades, is quite spectacular with its circular fortified cities and its princely tombs, which contain some of the oldest known spoke-wheeled chariots. Its possible long-distance links with the Mycenaean world have already been mentioned. Apart from the eponymous Sintashta site, the most mediatized site is Arkaim, discovered in 1987 and excavated by controversial archaeologist Gennady Zdanovich. No doubt in a laudable attempt to save it from being submerged by an artificial lake (he was successful in his efforts), the latter identified the site as a sort of original capital of the “Aryans.” Soon baptized “Swastika City” or “Mandala City” and considered a Stonehenge-like astronomical observatory, the site has attracted the attention of a number of New Age gurus who preside over imagined pagan ceremonies every year on the occasion of the summer solstice; it has also fallen prey to certain far-right nationalist movements. Arkaim is now seen as the “City of the Aryan hierarchy and of racial purity,” the place where “the Old Russian high priest Zoroaster is buried.” As Russian archaeologist Viktor Shnirelman49 has pertinently pointed out, this discovery, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, allowed the “Slavity” of these territories (although they were only relatively recently conquered by the Tsars) to be reaffirmed through their “Aryan-ness.” Naturally, Russian president Vladimir Putin has made a point of visiting these sites. Zdanovich himself has claimed: “We, the Slavs, consider ourselves as newcomers. But this is not true. The Indo-Europeans and Indo-Iranians have lived here [in the South Urals] since the Stone Age and have incorporated and unified through common ties the Kazakhs, Bashkirs and the Slavs.”50 And the circle is completed when it is claimed that the Indo-Europeans indeed came from the Far North before settling in the Urals."

"We realize, therefore, that even in these faraway places, whose study requires a certain level of archaeological knowledge, issues that appear to be scientific are, in fact, anything but innocent. Thus, the identification of the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures with the original Indo-Iranians, before their southward migration, is biased from the very start. All the more so since proof of the “Indo-Iranian” character of these cultures is quite weak. The existence of hearths, even in graves, is reminiscent of the fire cult practiced by later Indo-Iranians. But, like sacrifices of horses, bulls, and sheep, it is a practice found in numerous parts of the world. Beyond the caricature of Arkaim, the affirmation of ancient cultural ties between Russia and present day Turkish-speaking Central Asia (part of the USSR until 1992) is clearly a major issue regardless of whether the archaeologists involved are aware of it or not."

"A closer reading of the issues of Nouvelle École and Éléments both reinforces and refines this impression. For example, in each issue, the section headed “Éphémérides” singles out important historical dates and rarely misses an occasion to evoke the atrocities committed by the Allied forces during the Second World War. The iconography employed highlights the work of artists affiliated with the Nazi regime, such as the sculptor Arno Breker, the painter Wilhelm Petersen, and the illustrator and lithographer Georg Sluyterman van Langeweyde.19 One of the illustrations used in Vue de droite is particularly telling in this regard: from the pen of Georg Sluyterman van Langeweyde, it represents a proud medieval knight armed with a lance and originally graced the cover of the August 1940 edition of Germanien, the journal of the SS Ahnenerbe’s “cultural” institute; Alain de Benoist is happy to simply invert the image from left to right and—a tiny detail—replace the swastika on the knight’s shield with a two-headed eagle. Other illustrations are lifted directly from Germanien to embellish the pages of Nouvelle École and the official magazine of the GRECE."

"But, crucially, it is proofs of a southward migration toward India and Iran that are lacking. At the start of the second millennium, a powerful and prosperous proto-urban civilization known as the “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” (BMAC; also known as the Oxus civilization) flourished in the southern oases of Central Asia. Excavations carried out over the past thirty years have revealed hundreds of sites, the most notable of which, if we ignore the older excavations at Namazga and Altyn Depe, are Gonur Depe (sometimes interpreted as a capital), Togolok, Kelleli, Taip, Djarkutan, Dashly Depe, and Sapalli Depe.51 This is a true urban civilization, with mud-brick fortifications, temples, and palaces, founded on a prosperous agricultural economy (which involved the use of irrigation) and control over networks of neighboring villages. The graves of the elite contain high-value bronze and copper objects. Indeed, the region is rich in precious mineral resources: gold, copper, lead, silver, tin, turquoise, and lapis-lazuli. Craftsmanship was highly developed, and most of the pottery is wheel-thrown. The existence of seals attests to the degree of economic complexity, as do long-distance exchanges of luxury goods. The BMAC is therefore truly part of this urban belt of semi-arid South West Asia—stretching from Mesopotamia, through Iran (with the Elam and Jiroft cultures) to the Indus civilization in the east—which prospered during the second half of the third millennium and the early second millennium BCE. The objects exchanged also attest to contacts between the inhabitants of these cities and members of the vast Andronovo steppic culture situated immediately to the north."

"...Just as the cultures of the steppes have various historical origins and not solely Pontic, similarly, the BMAC has predecessors which are archaeologically visible in the material culture, both within its home area and further west, when the Neolithic way of life was being established. It is therefore very difficult to assign it a steppic origin. Incidentally, this is confirmed by biological anthropology, with all its limitations, which shows the permanency of physical characteristics within the BMAC and the very limited extent of mixing with steppic populations.57"

"At least one thing is sure: the collapse of both these urban civilizations (i.e., those of the BMAC and the Indus) was not caused by attacks by Andronovan barbarians from the steppes. In fact, it was the result of the slow breakdown of centralized authoritarian power, which did not leave behind a wasteland but rather gave way to more modest, village-type settlements. There are no traces of Andronovan objects south of the BMAC, and the same is true in the Hindu Kush mountain passes that lead to India. As we have seen, there are no traces either in the Indus Valley. But since the current languages spoken in Northern India indeed belong to the Indo-European group, there is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations."

"The problematic therefore becomes obvious: Which of the two peoples are the Indo-Iranians, the Andronovo people or the BMAC people, keeping in mind that their material cultures, as well as their economic systems, were radically different? Both answers have, of course, been proposed, each with acceptable arguments, and we will not even attempt to sum up the highly technical debates—ongoing and nowhere near resolution—between the proponents of the BMAC option52 (incidentally, this is where Adolphe Pictet located the original Cradle in 1859) and proponents of the steppic option.53 In reality, the archaeological arguments needed to certify the “Indo-Iranian-ness” of a given site are highly debatable.54 Reference is made to the existence of a “fire cult,” to the crushing of plants to obtain an inebriating drink (the soma of the Indians and the haoma of the Iranians—of which we know nothing), the exposure and defleshing of corpses, and, in contrast, their cremation, etc. However, these activities do not leave unequivocal and specific traces within the archaeological record. Cremation occurs no earlier on the steppes than in the BMAC area, and, in any case, it is not a particularly strong marker of ethnicity, regardless of the period in question.55 The iconography found on luxury goods associated with the BMAC does not share any themes with the ancient Indo-Iranian texts. We encounter a goddess, a bird of prey hero, a dragon, and an ibex-god, which evoke both a shared Eurasian background and clear influences from Elam; only a small number of silver vessels bear scenes that, according to Henri-Paul Francfort, might potentially find comparisons in Indo-Iranian mythologies.56"

"In France, the movement known as “Nouvelle Droite” would become one of the most mediatized, most developed, and best known examples, even though, strictly speaking it was not a fully formed doctrine but rather an evolving nebulous body made up of individuals, movements, publications, and doctrines and within which we encounter the classic themes of prewar right-wing extremism: hatred of equality, democracy, Judeo-Christianity, American imperialism, the neoliberal plutocracy, and racial mixing; the exaltation of an imperial, aristocratic, elitist, and even “pagan” Europe; and advocacy of racial inequality and, of course, of an “Indo-European heritage.” All of this was wrapped up in the traditional “neither left nor right” rhetoric of the extreme right."

"...there is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations. To this end, James Mallory, for example, came up with the military-inspired notion of Kulturkugel (“culture bullets”)—as if, perhaps, a Germanic term might excuse, almost in a humorous manner, the use of a diffusionist model by an English-speaking author. Mallory’s explanatory drawing shows a rifle cartridge (or a shell, depending) in which the bullet itself is the material culture and the charge is the language. Thus, the Indo-Aryan nomads of the steppes would have traveled across the BMAC, shedding their entire material culture on the way but not their language. Having thus become archaeologically undetectable, they would then have descended toward the Indus Plains to impose their new culture and their preserved language; this new culture would have had no known archaeological equivalent at the time."

"There are no traces of Andronovan objects south of the BMAC, and the same is true in the Hindu Kush mountain passes that lead to India. As we have seen, there are no traces either in the Indus Valley. But since the current languages spoken in Northern India indeed belong to the Indo-European group, there is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations."

"...The currently irresolvable contradictions that mar the many attempts made to reconcile the linguistic and archaeological evidence (and indeed biological anthropological evidence) for the “arrival of the Aryans in India” do not mean that the supposed “original Indo-European People” emerged in India (this would pose the same problems, but in reverse), nor do they mean that “invisible migrations” did not exist in the past. It simply means that, in the current state of knowledge, none of the hypotheses forwarded can be seriously demonstrated. Given the stakes involved, extreme caution needs to be exercised when attempting to solve this issue."

"There is in fact no evidence for the gradual progression of an entire material culture from the shores of the Black Sea to those of the Atlantic or the Ganges—unless, of course, we drastically force the data."

"While such reactions were foreseeable, I was nonetheless taken aback by their scale and by the use of certain language which I consider unacceptable. I was thus described as a “negationist” on the pretext that I had denied the existence of the original People. In French, this term is generally reserved for those who deny the reality of the Holocaust. While the process of twisting the meaning of words is typical of extreme right-wing rhetoric, it is nonetheless obscene when it concerns the very real assassination of six million human beings."

"If fortune has endowed any name with a more glorious history than that of Goth, it must surely be that of Frank. No German word has pushed out more roots into the soil of Europe, from the Franche- Comte to Franconia, from Frankfurt to Villefranche. The concepts of freedom, integrity and power are associated with it in all western languages."

"Articles under the heading Arier were included in the big popular encyclopaedias of Brockhaus and Meyer from 1864 and 1867 respectively, and the Arier is defined from the start as Indo-Germanic. The 14th edition of Brockhaus states specifically that it is better to apply the term Arier only to "Asian Aryans" and to use the term Indo-Germanic or Indo-European to describe the "European Aryans"."

"Some commentators have drawn attention to the divergent courses of the fertility rates in the two parts of Bengal. In Indian West Bengal, which is three quarters Hindu, the fertility rate is 2.07, below the re- placement level. The contrast with Muslim Bangladesh, where the transition has been blocked, is striking. A shared language should have led to a convergence through cultural contagion, but a pietistic Islam seems to have frozen changes in patterns of thought in Bangladesh and, as a repercussion, provoked a halt to the transition. But a consideration of educational patterns leads to a rejection of the hypothesis of a direct effect of the religious variable on fertility."

"The Pakistani fertility rate is slowly declining: In 1988 it was at 5.56 children, and since then it has lost only 0.9 percent annually. With 4.6 children in 2005, 6 the Pakistani fertility rate, the highest in this group, is far above that of the Arab world, except for Yemen. One cannot fail to be impressed by the alignment of the fertility of the Muslims of northern India with that of Pakistan: In 1998 –1999, it was 4.8 in Uttar Pradesh, 4.9 in Rajasthan, and 4 in Bihar. One might suggest a slight boost from the combined effect of minority status and the fact that Muslims in these states belong to the least privileged strata in social and educational terms. The minority effect must play the leading role, because elsewhere in India, in states where Muslims enjoy higher than average educational status, in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, they also have a higher fertility rate than their Hindu neighbors."

"The Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end."

"Scripturus bella regum cum gentibus adversis, martyrum cum paganis, eclesiarum cum hereticis, prius fidem meam proferre cupio, ut qui ligirit me non dubitet esse catholicum. Illud etiam placuit propter eos, qui adpropinquantem finem mundi disperant, ut, collectam per chronicas vel historias anteriorum annorum summam, explanitur aperte, quanti ab exordio mundi sint anni. Sed prius veniam legentibus praecor, si aut in litteris aut in sillabis grammaticam artem excessero, de qua adplene non sum inbutus; illud tantum studens, ut quod in eclesia credi praedicatur sine aliquo fuco aut cordis hesitatione reteneam, quia scio, peccatis obnoxium per credulitatem puram obtenire posse veniam apud Deum."

"Nec dubium enim est, quod hic primus homo Adam, antequam peccaret, tipum Redemptoris domini praetulisset. Ipsi enim in passionis sopore obdormiens, de latere suo dum aquam cruoremque producit, virginem inmaculatamque eclesiam sibi exhibuit, redemptam sanguine, latice emundatam, non habentem maculam aut rugam, id est limphis ablutam propter maculam, extensam in crucem propter rugam."

"Voilà le soleil d'Austerlitz."

"Tous les méchants sont buveurs d'eau: C'est bien prouvé par le déluge."

"Un bon mourir vaut mieux qu'un mal vivre."

"Il faut envisager le passé sans regrets, le présent sans faiblesse, et l'avenir sans illusions."

"Le cœur a ses secrets pour guérir les blessures qu'il reçoit."

"Il y a des femmes qui traversent la vie, comme ces souffles des printemps qui vivifient tout sur leur passage."

"L'art de régner consiste surtout dans l'habileté des choix."

"L'amitié est le premier besoin du coeur, personne ne peut s'en passer."

"La sottise est une maladie contagieuse, surut chez les sots."

"C'est un mérite rare que celui de reconnaître son erreur."

"La pire des tyrannies est celle qui opprime la pensée."

"Un allié trop puissant devient souvent plus redoutable qu'un ennemi."

"Il y a bien peu de gens pour qui la vérité ne soit pas une sorte d'injure."

"Le temps ordinairement explique tout."

"Une femme adultère est une mère sans entrailles."

"Les grands parleurs sont comme les vases vides, qui sonnent plus que ceux qui sont pleins."

"La vie d'un homme de bien est un combat continuel contre les mauvais penchants."

"La bienfaisance ne vieillit jamais; elle s'améliore avec l'âge, et devient une habitude."

"The Sumerians must have arrived in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium, apparently from the southeast."

"Qui Dieu vielt aidier, nuls hom ni li puet nuire."

"Qui va plus tost que la fumée, Si ce n'est la flamme allumée? Plus tost que la flamme? le vent: Plus tost que le vent? c'est la femme: Quoi plus? rien, elle va devant Le vent, la fumée et la flamme."

"The ideal of a united Christendom continued to haunt the soul of France in spite of the predominating influence gradually assumed in French politics by purely national aspirations."

"The present generation which has witnessed the outbreak of so many passions on the political scene, which has passed through so many calamities, will not see without interest that Providence sometimes employs great revolutions to enlighten mankind, and to ensure the future prosperity of empires."

"Il y a en Angleterre soizante sectes religieuses différentes, et une seule sauce."

"Nous sommes nés pour la vérité, et nous ne pouvons souffrir son abord. les figures, les paraboles, les emblémes, sont toujours des ornements nécessaires pour qu'elle puisse s'annoncer. et soit quon craigne qu'elle ne découvre trop brûsquement le défaut qu'on voudroit cacher, ou qu'enfin elle n'instruise avec trop peu de ménagement, ou veut, en la recevant, qu'elle soit déguisée."

"Islam is going through a crisis by contact with the Western world, and under the influence of Christianity many of the enlightened Turks dream of reforming its morals. On the other hand there has always been a certain opposition between the Arabs, who pretend to represent the pure Mussulman tradition, and the Turks."

"The Egyptians felt no need to establish an inventory of their gods. The efforts of the Hittites, who compiled laborious concordance lists matching their gods with those of their neighbors, must have made them smile."

"It was a revelation! Especially this word of greeting that I discovered. I remember, when I saw it, I had tears in my eyes. An appeal to the living."

"It is evident that the Chinese attitude of mind is undergoing a great change through contact with Western ideas and learning; what is less evident is that deeper layers of the nation have not been reached."

"The distinctive feature of Medieval philosophy, which reached its peak in scholasticism, is the effort to use reason to demonstrate a set of metaphysical doctrines capable of connecting, as far as possible, Hellenic philosophy of nature and Christian theology. While Greek philosophy started from the idea of a nature entirely permeated by the divine and subsequently fell due to the dissociation of these two principles, Scholasticism, for which the divine is essentially infinite personality and perfection, first radically separates God and nature and grants the latter only the attributes indispensable to a contingent existence. Nothing then prevents us from conceiving of perfect divine spirituality as coexisting with imperfect nature. Transcendent with respect to things, God is not affected by their imperfection. And the very imperfection of nature provides reason with the starting point for the arguments by which it establishes the philosophical truths implied in supernatural truths. Thus, the conditions of a natural philosophy were reconciled with those of a religious philosophy. (La scolastica, pp. 10-11)"

"Mysticism consists, according to a beautiful definition I find in Plotinus], in seeing with closed eyes [...] in seeing with the eyes of the soul, while the eyes of the body are closed. The essential phenomenon of mysticism is what is called ecstasy, a state in which, with all communication with the external world interrupted, the soul has the sense of communicating with an internal object, which is the infinite being, God. (La psicologia del misticismo, pp. 58-59)"

"[...] the person of Ravaisson himself is like the act, the fulfilment of the thought which, in his written philosophy, aspires to realise itself. He immediately distinguished himself by a grace, a distinction, a smiling serenity that never disappeared. He attracted people with his good grace and impressed them with his fundamental affinity with the noble and the great. He spoke with absolute simplicity and probity, concerned only with thinking correctly and expressing his thoughts faithfully and naturally, without ever allowing a word of effect or rhetorical artifice to enter his mind. He spoke about everything and was interested in the small pleasures of the world as well as the great questions of philosophy and life. But in all things he saw the link between the ideal and the real. Like the ancient Greeks, he saw the divine in everything. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, pp. 115-116)"

"Above all, [Félix Ravaisson] was a writer. He expressed himself in broad, flexible, simple and wise phrases, elegant and solid with an air of abandon, and the logical relationships between ideas and the aesthetic harmony that coordinates them and the creative action that brings forth the details, conditions and elements from the whole and from the beginning. His style is the very soul grasped in his inner life and in the secret movement through which it gives itself and spreads. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"The whole person of Ravaisson was the manifestation of one unique thing: his intimate union of thought and heart with spiritual and eternal realities. Deep down, he did not believe in death because he was convinced that what passes away has its being only in what remains. He saw things and people not only in their ideas, like Plato, but in their source, which is infinite love, superior to the Idea and unfailing. He not only professed his doctrine with conviction, but lived it. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"A philosopher is a man who compares the knowledge and beliefs of men in order to investigate their relationships; therefore, we want to know how Plato or Leibniz conceived these relationships; Furthermore, since a philosopher is not a seer to whom truth is revealed in a flash, but a patient researcher who reflects, criticises, doubts, hesitates, and surrenders only to obvious reasons, we want to know by what methodical means, by what observations and reasoning our author arrived at his conclusions. For this is not a matter of unconscious and mechanical work of his brain, but of a conscious and deliberate effort to overcome the limits of his own personality, to think universally, and to discover the truth. (Ch. I, p. 7)"

"[...] the history of philosophy deals with the doctrines conceived by philosophers, not philosophy in general in its entirety, nor the psychological evolution of each thinker in particular; therefore, its essential task, to which all others are subordinate, consists in penetrating and understanding doctrines, explaining them as well as possible, as the author himself would do, and presenting them in accordance with the spirit and, to a certain extent, the style of their author. (Ch. I, pp. 7-8)"

"Socrates' condemnation of ancient physics has its root cause in the ideas inherent in his own nation. Greece could not fully identify with the speculations on the principles of things to which the physiologists had gone. Without doubt, the power of reasoning, the ingenious subtlety, and the marvellous sense of harmony employed by these profound investigators were its heritage; but the immediate application of these spiritual qualities to material objects so foreign to man was contrary to the genius of an essentially political race, especially fond of fine words and fine deeds. (Ch. II, p. 22)"

"Boutroux [...] believes he is criticising science, but instead he criticises a puppet of formal logic, as if the logical power of thought were exhausted in the principle of identity, A is A; but conversely, he establishes a dogmatism worse than the scientific one (because it is philosophical) by considering all reality as a posteriori of experience. (Guido De Ruggiero, La filosofia contemporanea, Editori Laterza, Bari, 19648, part II, Ch. IV, p. 192)"

"Scientific laws, says Boutroux, result from the collaboration of the spirit and things; they are the product of the activity of the spirit applied to a foreign matter; and they represent the effort that the spirit makes to establish a coincidence between things and itself. But what coincidence is this, where it is not known with what thought must coincide? He rightly says that the highest forms of reality cannot be resolved into the lowest; but then he resolves into the lowest... precisely thought, that is, the very thought that alone can make us understand progress from below to above. Consequently, progress is clouded in the void of contingency, and all forms of reality become things in themselves, which thought can do nothing but shadow in its concepts, trying in vain to adapt to them. (Guido De Ruggiero, La filosofia contemporanea, Editori Laterza, Bari, 19648, Part II, Ch. IV, p. 191)"

"The main core around which Boutroux's thought revolves is the problem of science and the meaning of natural laws. From 1874, the year of his thesis, “De la Contingence des lois de la Nature”, until his death, i.e. for just under half a century, Boutroux developed and elaborated his critique of science, always insisting on it and basing his theories on freedom and religion on it, which form, one might say, the positive part of his philosophy. (Ugo Spirito, Il pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporanea, Vallecchi Editore, Firenze, 1921, cap. II, p. 142)"

"In the continuous development of nature and spirit, Boutroux believes it is impossible to establish anything definitive that has eternal value. Man, therefore, who is the greatest exponent of progress, does not know what his progress is tending towards; he does not know, therefore, whether his progress is true progress. Everything disappears into the indeterminate, into confusion, and the sceptical conclusion presents itself as compelling. But no: Boutroux, like James before him, does not lose himself in negation at this point and wants to save himself from scepticism. And so negation itself is transformed into affirmation. It is precisely the indistinct, the confused that contains the reason for life: in it is love, faith, the ideal; in it is that powerful impulse that moves the poet, the artist, the scientist himself, for science would be nothing without faith. But religion thus attained is an empty religion, and the ideal thus established is an ideal that fades into nothingness. (Ugo Spirito, Il pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporanea, Vallecchi Editore, Firenze, 1921, cap. II pp. 150-151)"

"He used to say that a philosophical system is a living thought; and, in truth, he not only taught his philosophy, but lived it, felt it, spread it and defended it in books and with words, in Europe and America, regardless of hardship, with all the ardour of a missionary."

"Poor health, which worsened with the passing of the years, forced him from his youth to withdraw into himself, to seek in his own spirit the best source of joy. Few penetrated his moral intimacy. But just seeing him like that, tall, pale, thin, emaciated, it was easy to guess what a rich inner life was enclosed in that frail body, and how the world of the spirit must have been the only real world for him."

"For many years, the clergy of the parish of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont cherished the memory of that pale teenager, who never missed divine services and zealously fulfilled all religious practices. In turn, Boutroux never forgot the church of his first communion, the church where his spirit had been nourished and strengthened in those religious convictions that were to form the basis and crowning glory of his philosophical views. As an adult, he returned there more than once to recall the sweet memories of his younger years and to meditate at the tomb of Blaise Pascal."

"An attempt has been made to prove, by means of selected passages from Pascal's Pensées, an apology for Christianity which he left in draft form, that by sacrificing reason to faith he denied the possibility of all philosophy. I propose to show, not as others seem to have done successfully, that Pascal was not a sceptic, but that in his “'Pensées”' there are, if not a system comparable in scope and detail to those of Descartes, of a Spinoza, a Malebranche or a Leibniz, at least the ideas that constitute the principles of a true philosophy. I propose to show equally that these ideas are in perfect agreement with Pascal's beliefs, and that there is no reason to be surprised by them, because there are none more suitable for harmonising, and even intimately uniting, Christianity and philosophy in their highest parts. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 131)"

"Pascal contrasts the objects of mathematics with other objects that are completely different, which he does not group under a common name, but merely enumerates and describes, although it is easy to recognise what he might have called, if he had had the language of his time, things of an aesthetic and moral nature; and at the same time he characterises with precise features the faculties of the mind to which these two kinds of objects respectively belong. No one else, in fact, had a clearer awareness of the difference between the two orders of things and faculties, whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit; no one else had such a correct and vivid sense of the special nature of the two orders, and knew their consequences so well. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 144)"

"Leibniz noted that things can be compared either in terms of what one contains of the other, which is to compare them by their quantity, or in terms of their similarity to one another, which is to compare them by their qualities. To reduce a question of measurement to a question of order or arrangement is therefore to move from the point of view of quantity to that of quality, to move from a lower genus, where deduction is appropriate, to a higher genus, where only intuition has a place [...]. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 153)"

"[...] the person of Ravaisson himself is like the act, the fulfilment of the thought which, in his written philosophy, aspires to realise itself. He immediately distinguished himself by a grace, a distinction, a smiling serenity that never disappeared. He attracted people with his good grace and impressed them with his fundamental affinity with the noble and the great. He spoke with absolute simplicity and probity, concerned only with thinking correctly and expressing his thoughts faithfully and naturally, without ever allowing a word of effect or rhetorical artifice to enter his mind. He spoke about everything and was interested in the small pleasures of the world as well as the great questions of philosophy and life. But in all things he saw the link between the ideal and the real. Like the ancient Greeks, he saw the divine in everything. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, pp. 115-116)"

"Above all, [Félix Ravaisson] was a writer. He expressed himself in broad, flexible, simple and wise phrases, elegant and solid with an air of abandon, and the logical relationships between ideas and the aesthetic harmony that coordinates them and the creative action that brings forth the details, conditions and elements from the whole and from the beginning. His style is the very soul grasped in his inner life and in the secret movement through which it gives itself and spreads. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"The whole person of Ravaisson was the manifestation of one unique thing: his intimate union of thought and heart with spiritual and eternal realities. Deep down, he did not believe in death because he was convinced that what passes away has its being only in what remains. He saw things and people not only in their ideas, like Plato, but in their source, which is infinite love, superior to the Idea and unfailing. He not only professed his doctrine with conviction, but lived it. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"Revolutions are not effected of a sudden. Christianity accepts society as it is, influencing it for its transformation through, and only through, individual souls."

"Napoleon's career was too brief to enable men to see whether his course would undergo any change."

"When at the present day we approach such subjects we are met at every turn by the danger of falling into platitude and cant, and it would seem as if an entirely novel phraseology must be invented for the religious poetry and art of the future. Yet the sorrow is the same, and the hope the same, which mediaeval art symbolised by the archetypal forms of Genesis as by those beloved of Christ, and we do but wait for some sincere religious movement for a noble iconography to be again evolved, believing that Christianity is a storehouse, inexhaustible, of germs which it does but take successive intellectual atmospheres to develop."

"Many of the people, deserted by their leaders and fearing future want, sold their bows, took up their pilgrims’ staves, and returned to their homes as cowards."

"Who ever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacians, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks, and Armenians? If any Breton or Teuton wished to question me, I could neither understand nor answer."

"The material is scanty; the historian must read between the lines; he must above all avoid rash generalizations. It is evident that Arnold was right, human nature has not varied much throughout the ages. While it is not possible to form a picture of an average Crusader, as elusive a character as the 'economic man,' it is possible to form some concept of Fulcher's character and limitations, and through him of the acts and points of view of other Crusaders in the time of the First Crusade and in the years when the Kingdom of Jerusalem was still a strong and prosperous colony."

"For some years past, people appear only to take pleasure in extolling those who have been engaged in the work of destruction. The most illustrious public bodies take pleasure in listening to the praises of those who have ruined the old state of society, and no man is considered clever, learned, or virtuous, unless he has been at least half a regicide. As for me I request a little space for the politicians who create, preserve, or add to a state,—for the men whose works still endure, and survive all those who declaimed against them."

"I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

"Since perhaps there are some, who may think themselves concerned in this History, because they are the Grand-children or Descendants of those who are here mentioned, I desire them to consider, Writing like a faithfull Historian, I am oblig'd sincerely to relate either the good or ill, which they have done. If they find themselves offended, they must take their satisfaction on those who have prescrib'd the Laws of History: let them give an account of their own rules; for Historians are indispensably bound to follow them; and the sum of our reputation consists in a punctual execution of their orders."

"A corrupted and weakened community breaks down in immense catastrophes; the iron harrow of revolutions crushes men like the clods of the field; but, in the blood-stained furrows germinates a new generation, and the soul aggrieved, believes again."

"The human race experienced on a grand scale what we experience on a small scale, namely the struggle between spirit and flesh, reason and passion. God made us one, but sin divided us, and since then there have been two men within us, Cain and Abel, the first carnal and the second spiritual, one earthly and the other heavenly, one of man and the other of God. (vol. I, p. 98)"

"The Brahmins, these much-vaunted philosophers, willingly call themselves the [gods] of the earth, and to justify that title, they attribute this genealogy to themselves; now they descend from those seven Richis or penitents who were saved from the flood together with Manou, and who, because of their extreme holiness, were transported to heaven and are the seven stars of the Great Bear; Now, and this is the most popular fable, when Brahma wanted to create men, he drew the Brahmins from his head; the Kchatrias or warriors from his shoulders; the Vaishyas or merchants from his belly; and the Shudras or artisans from his feet. These are the four castes established and consecrated by the philosophers of India as the foundation of the religious and political constitution. (vol. I, p. 707)"

"[...] the Brahmins are the Pharisees of India, because of their affectation in their way of life, their scrupulousness about external stains, their constant use of ablutions and bathing, their zeal, their attention to detail, the same negligence of what is most essential, the same pride, the same ostentation, and the same hypocrisy. Nor are there any who literally practice what the Savior says, that is, who drink through a strainer for fear of swallowing an insect, while swallowing a camel, that is, trampling on justice, humanity, and mercy. (vol. I, p. 708)"

"Far below the lowest caste and well below the sudras, a quarter of the Indian population languishes in servitude, disgrace, and misery, under the name of parias. Eating with these unfortunate people, or touching food prepared by them, or even drinking water drawn by them; using earthenware vessels they have held in their hands; setting foot in their dwellings or allowing them to enter one's own, are, in the eyes of philosophers, crimes that exclude an Indian from his caste. (vol. I, p. 708)"

"Epicurus may therefore turn and twist as he likes, deny Providence, deny the punishments and rewards of another life; make justice, friendship, and every other virtue serve pleasure; reduce the human intellect to combinations of atoms, and aspire, as the highest of goods, to the condition of the beast, which always finds itself in the same place, alone against all, alone in all places, against all times and against all men or the whole human race, which never ceases to proclaim a rewarding and avenging God, the immortality of the soul and the eternal distinction between good and evil, and thus condemns the Epicurean system as equally false and shameful. (vol. I, p. 774)"

"According to the false prophet of Mecca, everything happens out of inevitable necessity; there is no free will in man: God works all actions in us, both good and bad; so that he punishes the wicked for the sins that he himself has wrought in them. To those who cried out against such blasphemy, Muhammad gave only one answer: This is a mystery, a secret. Yes, the mystery of Satan, the author of all evil, who wants to place all blame on God himself, the author of all good. Now, the same mystery of impiety is revealed in Lutheranism. According to the false prophet of Wittenberg, as according to the false prophet of Mecca, everything happens to man out of inevitable necessity, and there is no free will in us. God works in us both evil and good; and he will punish us not only for the evil we could not avoid, but also for the good we did as best we could. In this, Luther greatly surpasses Muhammad in impiety, for Muhammad never said that God would punish us for the same good, and that good works were as many sins."

"... many Europeans today go to Pelasgians, who are no less distant or savage, and for equally slight gains, to discover African Arkadias. The taste for voyages and adventures is not the monopoly of any one period or any one race, and the extraordinary dispersion of Semites in the contemporary world ... It is true that modern travellers have two motives that the Sidonians do not appear to have possessed, at least to the same degree: scientific curiosity and religious zeal. Furthermore, this comparison between the Pelasgians and the modern Congolese may be surprising. However, one should be on guard against two preconceived ideas, or rather two little-reasoned and almost unconscious feelings: ... our European chauvinism and also what one could call, without too much irreverence, our Greek fanaticism.From Strabo to Ritter, all the geographers have taught us to consider our Europe as a land favoured above all others, unique and superior to all the others in beauty ... in elegance of forms and power of civilization ... This way of looking at the world perhaps can influence a large number of our most habitual thoughts, despite ourselves or almost without our knowledge. We put Europe on one side and Asia or Africa on the other—and between the two, an abyss. When we talk about Asiatic influences on a European country we cannot imagine ... that barbarians could have dared to come to us. Harsh reality forces us to admit that they have sometimes flooded in. Certain people even maintain that the cradle of our first ancestors was far from our Europe, in the centre of Asia. But for our Aryan fathers we have the indulgence of good sons in that even if they came from Asia, they were not Asiatics, they were for all eternity Indo-Europeans. By contrast, an invasion from Semitic Asia to our Aryan Europe is repugnant to all our prejudices. It seems really as if the Phoenician coast was further away from us than the Iranian plateau. It also appears that the Arab invasion throughout the Mediterranean was only a unique fluke, an unfortunate chance ... which one should not for an instant suppose could be repeated. That the Phoenicians occupied Carthage and possessed half Tunisia only concerns Africa. That the Carthaginians in their turn conquered Spain and three-quarters of Sicily is [all right because they are] only, as we say, Africa. But when we find Phoenician traces at Marseilles, Praeneste, Kythera, Salamis Thasos and Samothrace, in Boiotia and in Lakonia at Rhodes and in Crete we do not want, as in Africa, real occupations; we only talk about temporary landings or simple trading posts ... If we go as far as pronouncing the words fortresses or Phoenician possessions we hasten to add that they were only coastal establishments ... This European chauvinism becomes a veritable fanaticism when it is not in Gaul, Etruria, Lucania or Thrace but in Greece that we meet the stranger. At the beginning of this century, all Europe rose up ... the generous Philhellenism of 1820 is no longer fashionable. But one can say that the sentiment has not greatly changed ... We can only conceive of Greece as the country of heroes and gods. Under porticos of white marble ... In vain does Herodotos tell us that everything comes from Phoenicia and Egypt. We know what we should think of dear old Herodotos. After twenty years of Archaeology have provided us, every day and in all the Greek states, with indisputable proofs of Oriental influence, we are still not allowed to treat Greece as an Oriental province like Caria, Lycia or Cyprus because of this. If in our geography we separate Europe from Asia, in our history we separate Greek history from what we call ancient history. We see, nevertheless, from their material and tangible monuments that the Greeks ... were the pupils of Phoenicia and Egypt, and we see that they borrowed from the Semitic Orient right up to their alphabet; yet we recoil with some shock at the sacrilegious hypothesis that their institutions, their customs, their religions, their rituals, their ideas, their literature and all their primitive civilization could also be inherited from the Orient."

"Ce temps, si court, a des langueurs mortelles Quand l'âme oisive en compte les instans: C'est le travail qui lui donne des ailes."

"Dans les espaces immenses de l'erreur, la vérité n'est qu'un point. Qui l'a saisi, ce point unique?"

"Il n'est pas permis à tous les hommes d'être grands, mais ils peuvent tous être bons."

"L'éloquence est dans l'âme, et non dans la parole."

"Le ciel, l'enfer sont dans le cœur de l'homme."

"Où peut-on être mieux Qu'au sein de sa famille?"

"En général le ridicule touche au sublime, et pour marcher sur la limite qui les sépare, sans la passer jamais, il faut bien prendre garde à soi."

"Quand on n'a pas ce que l'on aime, il faut aimer ce que l'on a."

"En général le ridicule touche au sublime."

"Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve."

"Let Man remember that he is the Master, but not a Tyrant."