Philosophy

""I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Ah, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys."

"All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates."

"You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie [robot QT-1] has his." "Then let’s get at those postulates in a hurry. The storm’s due tomorrow." Powell sighed wearily. "That’s where everything falls down. Postulates are based on assumptions and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. ..."

"Aristotle is noted for his writings on logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and literature. These works are marked by sober tone, subtle analysis, and empirical accuracy. In logic, he produced the first textbooks ever written. They deal with some of the problems which Plato had suggested but not considered in detail."

"In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason. The former directs us to look for simplest causes, the later cautions us not to simplify so far that the explanation is inadequate to the facts to be explained....Parsimony is not itself a simple criterion of a good methodology; we cannot simply count the factors of explanation and say that the theory containing the smallest number is the best. The ideal of parsimony cannot be expressed without the proviso that the conditions for which it is a norm shall themselves be adequate."

"LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion -- thus:"

"R. A. Fisher, J. Neyman, R. von Mises, W. Feller, and L. J. Savage denied vehemently that probability theory is an extension of logic, and accused Laplace and Jeffreys of committing metaphysical nonsense for thinking that it is."

"No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical."

"If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle."

"Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged."

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."

"Utility and necessity of logic - It would be a mistake to imagine that, above and beyond what is called the Natural Logic of sound common sense, the study of the Science of Logic is absolutely necessary for right reasoning. Men reasoned rightly before Aristotle ever formulated a canon of logic. It was, in fact, by an analysis of such reasonings that he discovered those canons: they could never have been discovered otherwise. Here as elsewhere the art came before the science; theory followed practice. A man may reason rightly without knowing a single rule of the syllogism; or, conversely, he may know all the details of logic and be an indifferent guide to truth just as a first-rate geometrician may be a failure as an engineer. But still, just as his knowledge of geometry will enable the geometrician to detect the defects in a piece of engineering, so too will an explicit knowledge of the canons of reasoning enable us to discover more readily where the fallacy of a misleading argument lies. Without professing to guard us infallibly from error, logic familiarizes us with the rules and canons to which right reasoning processes must conform, and with the hidden fallacies and pitfalls to which such processes are commonly exposed."

"The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."

"The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious."

"We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of exact science are mathematics and logic: the mathematical sect puts out the logical eye, the logical sect puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it can see better with one eye than with two."

"Pierce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist."

"It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it."

"Adherents of formal logic may be compared to a maker of porcelain dishes who would contend that he was simply paying attention to the form of his dishes, pots, and vases, but that he did not have anything to do with the raw material."

"“It’s logical,” Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like coping with logic when it dictates hard decisions. That’s a problem with people, not logic.”"

"These, briefly, are the key elements of the stereotype: logic cripples and constrains; it forces one into narrow and mechanical modes of thought that cut one off from a vast range of superior thoughts, feelings and perceptions; logic is an enemy of wit and humor (Mr. Spock's face was always an impassive mask); logic makes us dull and pedantic (Mr. Spock always spoke in a monotone); logic presupposes a simple-minded, black-and-white, yes-no conception of the world. ... Logic misses the point of half the things we ordinarily say and cannot match the insight of the humblest person's common sense."

"From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other."

"The first question we should face is: What is the aim of a physical theory? To this question diverse answers have been made, but all of them may be reduced to two main principles: "A physical theory," certain logicians have replied, "has for its object the explanation of a group of laws experimentally established." "A physical theory," other thinkers have said, "is an abstract system whose aim is to summarize and classify logically a group of experimental laws without claiming to explain these laws... Now these two questions — Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? — do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics. Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics... Now, to make physical theories depend on metaphysics is surely not the way to let them enjoy the privilege of universal consent."

"Logic is usually understood nowadays as a study of certain formal systems, though in former times there were philosophers who held that the subject matter of logic was the formal rules of human thought."

"The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced."

"To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation."

"Logic by definition is that which makes sense: nothing more, nothing less. No miracles. No supernatural hocus-pocus. Everything that takes place, every event, every effect, is logically caused by something, something which preceded it in time, and which provided the physico-chemical causative chain that resulted in the effect. These premises are the foundations of our intellectual existence."

"Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow."

"To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad."

"Logic is logic. That's all I say."

"Logic is one thing and commonsense another."

"But in this age, logic was a flame that must be frequently starved of fuel."

"I have expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer?"

"Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true."

"Moreover, growing uncertainty surrounded even the one too which the academic philosophers felt they could trust: logic. Two centuries before, Kant had asserted in his Logik (1800): ‘There are but few sciences that can come into a permanent state, which admits of no further alteration. To these belong Logic … We do not require any further discoveries in Logic, since it contains merely the form of thought.’ As late as 1939, a British philosopher asserted: ‘Dictators may be powerful today, but they cannot alter the laws of logic, nor indeed can even God do so.’ Thirteen years later the American philosopher Willard Quine calmly accepted that the definition of logic was undergoing fundamental change: ‘What difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler succeeded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?’ In the decades that followed, many rival systems to classical logic emerged: Bochvar’s many-valued logic, new systems by Birkhoff and Destouches-Février and Reichenbach, minimal logic, deontic logics, tense logics. It became possible to speak of empirical proof or disproof of logic."

"What would be the consequences for the theory of truth, asked one worried logician,’… of the adoption of a non-standard system’? Another, observing systems of modal logic, observed: ‘One gets an uneasy feeling as one discerns and studies more of the systems belonging to this family that it is literally a family, and has the power of reproducing and multiplying, proliferating new systems [of logic] without limit.’ In a world in which even the rules of logic shifted and disintegrated, it is not surprising that modern times did not develop in ways the generation of 1920 would have considered ‘logical’."

"Logic hasn't wholly dispelled the society of witches and prophets and sorcerers and soothsayers."

"Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge."

"Logic is concerned with arguments, good and bad. With the docile and the reasonable, arguments are sometimes useful in settling disputes. With the reasonable, this utility attaches only to good arguments. It is the logician's business to serve the reasonable. Therefore, in the realm of arguments, it is the logician who distinguishes good from bad."

"The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam."

"Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence."

""There is one basis of science," says Descartes, "one test and rule of truth, namely, that whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true." A profound psychological mistake. It is true only of formal logic, wherein the mind never quits the sphere of its first assumptions to pass out into the sphere of real existences; no sooner does the mind pass from the internal order to the external order, than the necessity of verifying the strict correspondence between the two becomes absolute. The Ideal Test must be supplemented by the Real Test, to suit the new conditions of the problem."

"Anyone who has heard (Jacques Derrida) lecture in French knows that he is more performance artist than logician. His flamboyant style--using free association, rhymes and near-rhymes, puns, and maddening digressions--is not just a vain pose (though it is surely that). It reflects what he calls a self-conscious "acommunicative strategy" for combating logocentrism."

"The contemporary mathematical and symbolic logic is certainly very different from its classical predecessor, but they share the radical opposition to dialectical logic. In terms of this opposition, the old and the new formal logic express the same mode of thought. it is purged from that “negative” which loomed so large at the origins of logic and of philosophic thought—the experience of the denying, deceptive, falsifying power of the established reality. And with the elimination of this experience, the conceptual effort to sustain the tension between “is” and “ought”, and to subvert the established universe of discourse in the name of its own truth is likewise eliminated from all thought which is to be objective, exact, and scientific. For the scientific subversion of the immediate experience which establishes the truth of science as against that of immediate experience does not develop the concepts which carry in themselves the protest and the refusal. The new scientific truth which they oppose to the accepted one does not contain in itself the judgment that condemns the established reality. ... In contrast, dialectical thought is and remains unscientific to the extent to which it is such judgment."

"This fallacy [appeal to authority] is not in itself an error; it is impossible to learn much in today's world without letting somebody else crunch the numbers and offer us explanations. And teachers are sources of necessary information. But how we choose our "authorities" and place a value on such information, is just another skill rarely taught in our education systems. It's little wonder that to most folk, sound bites and talking heads are enough to count as experts. […] Teaching is reinforcing the appeal to authority, where anybody who seems more intelligent than you must ultimately be right. […] We educators must simply role-model critical thinking. […] Educators themselves have to be prepared to show that “evidence” and “answers” are two separate things by firmly believing that, themselves."

"The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse."

"Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities."

"Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence."

"Able logicians have a trick of being unutterably wrong when they come to write about life: the instinctive, intuitive sense of human values often fails them quite. Logic is more likely to make a man a fool than the lack of logic is."

"It might ... have been supposed that logicians and psychologists would have devoted special attention to meaning, since it is so vital for all the issues with which they are concerned. But that this is not the case will be evident[1] to anyone who studies the Symposium in Mind (October 1920 and following numbers) on "The Meaning of 'Meaning.'""

"Logicians tell us that a system of ideas containing a contradiction can be used to deduce any statement whatsoever, no matter how absurd."

"Logic and mathematics seem to be the only domains where self-evidence manages to rise above triviality; and this it does, in those domains, by a linking of self-evidence on to self-evidence in the chain reaction known as proof."

"Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation."

"Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas."

"A certain maxim of Logic which I have called Pragmatism has recommended itself to me for diverse reasons and on sundry considerations."

"It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better."

"The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise the valuable results which must attend discipline of mind. Like a medicine, though not a panacea for every ill, it has the health of the mind for its aim, but requires the determination of a powerful will to imbibe its nauseating yet wholesome influence: it is no wonder therefore that puny intellects, like weak stomachs, abhor and reject it."

"Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!"

"Mathematics and logic, historically speaking, have been entirely distinct studies. Mathematics has been connected with science, logic with Greek. But both have developed in modern times: logic has become more mathematical and mathematics has become more logical. The consequence is that it has now become wholly impossible to draw a line between the two; in fact, the two are one. They differ as boy and man: logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic. This view is resented by logicians who, having spent their time in the study of classical texts, are incapable of following a piece of symbolic reasoning, and by mathematicians who have learnt a technique without troubling to inquire into its meaning or justification. Both types are now fortunately growing rarer. So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premises which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary."

"The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important."

"All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies."

"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me."

"The apparent world goes through developments which are the same as those the logician goes through if he starts from Pure Being and travels on to the Absolute Idea. [...] Why the world should go through this logical evolution is not clear; one is tempted to suppose that the Absolute Idea did not quite understand itself at first, and made mistakes when it tried to embody itself in events. But this, of course, was not what Hegel would have said."

"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."

"A crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational"."

"When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present."

"[My aim is] to design logic as a calculating discipline, especially to give access to the exact handling of relative concepts, and, from then on, by emancipation from the routine claims of natural language, to withdraw any fertile soil from "cliché" in the field of philosophy as well. This should prepare the ground for a scientific universal language that, widely differing from linguistic efforts like Volapük [a universal language like Esperanto, very popular in Germany at the time], looks more like a sign language than like a sound language."

"Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable."

"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end."

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."

"An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."

"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."

"Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought."

"The moment we stop assuming that the ideas of any milieu form static 'propositional systems', and recognize that they constitute historically developing 'conceptual populations', we are free to abandon also the philosophers' traditional assumption that rationality is a sub-species of logicality. ...In non-intellectual contexts... we judge the rationality of a man's conduct, not by how he habitually behaves, but rather how far he modifies his behaviour in new and unfamiliar situations, and it is arguable that the rationality of intellectual performances should be judged, correspondingly, by considering, not the internal consistency of a man's habitual concepts and beliefs, but rather the manner in which he modifies this intellectual position in the face of new and unforeseen experiences."

"Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect."

"As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom."

"Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realizes himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition."

"Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. ... The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2."

"Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing."

"[ Fuzzy logic is ] a logic whose distinguishing features are (i) fuzzy truth-values expressed in linguistic terms, e.g., true, very true, more or less true, or somewhat true, false, nor very true and not very false, etc2.; (2) imprecise truth tables; and (3) rules of inference whose validity is relative to a context rather than exact."

"The problem I have with utilitarianism is not that it is excessively rational, but that the epistemological foundations are weak. My problem is: What are those objects we are adding up? I have no objection to adding them up if there's something to add. But the one thing I retain from utilitarianism is that, basically, judgements are based on consequences. Certainly that's the sort of thing we do in the theory of the single individual under uncertainty; you make sure utility is defined only over the consequences. I view rights as arrangements which may help you in achieving a higher utility level."

"By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness."

"By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case come to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party who whose is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual; then the happiness of that individual."

"Dr. Priestley published his Essay on Government in 1768. He there introduced ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ It was by that pamphlet, and this phrase in it, that my principles on the subject of morality, public and private together, were determined. It was from that pamphlet and that page of it, that I drew the phrase, the words and import of which have been so widely diffused over the civilized world. At the sight of it, I cried out, as it were, in an inward ecstasy, like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principle of hydrostatics, eureka!"

"The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os , are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

"The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die. He does everything reasonable to put off the day of his death—providing for defense, peace, order, health and wealth —but actively suppresses the fact that the day must come. His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such."

"In the case of the lower animals it seems much more appropriate to speak of their social instincts, as having been developed for the general good rather than for the general happiness of the species. The term, general good, may be defined as the rearing of the greatest number of individuals in full vigour and health, with all their faculties perfect, under the conditions to which they are subjected. As the social instincts both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been developed by nearly the same steps, it would be advisable, if found practicable, to use the same definition in both cases, and to take as the standard of morality, the general good or welfare of the community, rather than the general happiness; but this definition would perhaps require some limitation on account of political ethics."

"As all men desire their own happiness, praise or blame is bestowed on actions and motives, according as they lead to this end; and as happiness is an essential part of the general good, the greatest-happiness principle indirectly serves as a nearly safe standard of right and wrong."

"Utilitarianism is a great idea with an awful name. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy."

"Bentham and Mill introduced a perfectly general standard for measuring moral value and for making hard moral decisions: All actions are to be measured by the sum of their effects on happiness. Utilitarianism is a splendid idea (...) [b]ut it's also a highly controversial idea, the object of two centuries' worth of philosophical debate."

"We can summarize utilitarianism thus: Happiness is what matters, and everyone's happiness counts the same. This doesn't mean that everyone gets to be equally happy, but it does mean that no one's happiness is inherently more valuable than anyone else's."

"Utilitarianism is a very egalitarian philosophy, asking the haves to do a lot for the have-nots. Were you to wake up tomorrow as a born-again utilitarian, the biggest change in your life would be your newfound devotion to helping unfortunate others."

"I don’t know what the best normative ethical theory is for individuals in their private lives. But when we talk about making laws and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism. I think Jeremy Bentham was right that laws and public policies should aim, as a first approximation, to produce the greatest total good."

"The utilitarian notion...has the fatal limitation that it attempts to assign limits to what is, or may in the future become, useful, in accordance with a more or less arbitrarily restricted standard of what constitutes utility."

"I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people."

"the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."

"The ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable (...), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, (...) This, being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation."

"The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind."

"All desirable things...are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain."

"The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end."

"Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions."

"That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it."

"Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned."

"It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing."

"A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make any one answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to justify that exception."

"The satisfaction of the much stigmatized animal propensities," or carnal desires," whatever they are, may be just as exemplary and noble as the satisfaction of the desire for knowledge or opulence; and they are, in fact, frequently more so. The only rational characterization of a low desire is one incapable of yielding to the universe in its satisfaction large returns of happiness. And a high desire is simply one affording to the universe in its satisfaction wide and profound welfare. The only reason why any desire, so-called "high" or so-called low," should be kept in abeyance is that its satisfaction will not contribute to the utilities. There is no reason why any desire capable of satisfaction possessed by a living being should not be satisfied, except that its satisfaction may interfere with the satisfaction of other more valuable desires possessed by the being himself or by other beings."

"Each living being of the universe, therefore, sustains to every other living being the relation of possible right and wrong, but to the insentient universe no such relation exists. Right is that relation which is conducive to happiness, or welfare, or complete living, or whatever synonym is preferred. Wrong is that which conduces to the opposite of happiness—misery, ill-fare, maladaptation."

"Why should living beings struggle against each other, except as they struggle to advance the general welfare? Happiness is just as valuable and just as beautiful a thing in one being as in another. Some have greater talent for it than have others but it is a state of sweetness and elation always and everywhere. And each living being, in deliberating on the problem of the proprieties, should realize the fact that, as a matter of fact, it is a matter of indifference whether this relation belongs to his sensorium or to some other sensorium. It is insane for each being to insist that he, as an organism, is the one organism to whom pleasure is indispensable. The only indispensable is that pleasure be maximized. If a definite amount of happiness is to be experienced, it is, in the eyes of the absolute, a matter of indifference whether this happiness is experienced by one individual or by another, by self or by some other conscious portion of the universe."

"Those things, thoughts, beings, acts, and instincts which help us to the pleasurable experiences of life we call good, and those which deprive us of pleasure or which bring upon us painful experiences we call bad. This is the supreme standard—Utility. Is the thing, thought, being, act, or impulse useful? Does it lead directly or indirectly to happiness and well-being? If it does, it is right, proper, and good. If it does not, it is wrong, improper, and bad."

"The well being of others is on an average as important as our own, and should as a general thing be appraised at the same value. If a certain amount of happiness is scheduled to fall to the lot of the earth, it makes absolutely no difference whether it falls on me, or on you, or on somebody a thousand miles away. It would serve the ends of absolute ethics quite as well if it fell on an insect or a horse as if it fell on a man. The only important thing from the standpoint of universal good is that the pleasure be experienced. It is not important what particular individual or species is the beneficiary. It might even go to another world, and be just as satisfactory to a universal well-wisher, who looked at Cosmos from the serene altitudes of pure reason, without any prejudices whatever one way or another in the matter. This is the ideal. It is a long, long way from our natures. But only in so far as we approximate this ideal do we rise above those imperfections of our being which have been ground out by the methods that have operated in the development of life on earth."

"Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure and pain, ... are plausible modes of thought and naïvetés, which every one conscious of creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with scorn. ... We regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. ... Well-being, as you understand it—is certainly not a goal; it seems to us ... a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible."

"Critics would argue that conceiving the end of life as a perpetual cosmic orgasm is the reductio ad absurdum of classical utilitarianism. But will posthuman superintelligence respect human conceptions of absurdity?"

"Perfect the Will, the Mind, Feeling, their corporeal organs and their material tools; be useful to yourselves, to your own ones, and to others; and Happiness, insofar as it exists on this earth, will come of itself."

"In their time, Bentham's ideas promoted progress, reform, wider democracy, and the amelioration of undesirable social conditions. Bentham lived... when common people, the "labouring poor," had little voice and no vote... Their toil and sacrifices enhanced the power of the nation, the glory of its rulers, the wealth of industrialists and merchants, and the indolent ease of the aristocrats. Yet here was a philosopher who said that people are people regardless of their social position. ...[L]egislators ought actively to augment the total happiness of the community. Instead of the people serving the state, the state should serve the people. ...[H]is slogan for government was "Be quiet." But he did not worship laissez-faire as a principle to be accepted blindly. ...[T]he state should monopolize the issue of paper money, thereby saving interest on its borrowing. It should... operate life and annuity insurance, and tax inheritance, monopolies, [etc.] ...Bentham's idea of diminishing marginal utility of money suggested an argument for the redistribution of income. ...[M]ore happiness will be gained by the poor... than will be lost by the wealthy... Bentham's devotion to the greatest good for the greatest number led him to... advocate for.. democratic reforms. He supported universal (male) suffrage, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, and the secret ballot. He opposed the monarchy and the , arguing that only in a democracy do the interest of the gonernors and the governed become identical. ...Bentham urged a system of national education, even for pauper children. Frugality Banks... should... stimulate saving by the poor. should provide jobs for unemployed workers during slack times. ...He designed ...a model prison that would reform criminals rather than punish them. No wonder Bentham and his circle of intellects (including James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Ricardo) were called "philosophic radicals.""

"It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise. Belief in happiness, I found, was called Utilitarianism, and was merely one among a number of ethical theories. I adhered to it after this discovery."

"This utilitarian view of the mind ... is an external view only, which marks the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its specific essence. ... If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to expedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and a chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be expedited, nor could anything be useful to it."

"Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance."

"Those proud Islanders whom many unduly honour, know no watchword but gain and enjoyment. Their zeal for knowledge is only a sham fight, their worldly wisdom a false jewel, skilfully and deceptively composed, and their sacred freedom itself too often and too easily serves self-interest. They are never in earnest with anything that goes beyond palpable utility. All knowledge they have robbed of life and use only as dead wood to make masts and helms for their life's voyage in pursuit of gain."

"The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view...of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realized in the one case than in the other."

"We have next to consider who the “all” are, whose happiness is to be taken into account. Are we to extend our concern to all the beings capable of pleasure and pain whose feelings are affected by our conduct? or are we to confine our view to human happiness? The former view is the one adopted by Bentham and Mill, and (I believe) by the Utilitarian school generally: and is obviously most in accordance with the universality that is characteristic of their principle. It is the Good Universal, interpreted and defined as ‘happiness’ or ‘pleasure,’ at which a Utilitarian considers it his duty to aim: and it seems arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end, as so conceived, any pleasure of any sentient being."

"How far we are to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of now-existing human beings? The answer to this, though, seems clear: the time at which a man exists can’t affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; so the interests of posterity must concern a utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries—except in that the effect of his actions on the lives and even the existence of posterity must be more uncertain."

"The core precept of utilitarianism is that we should make the world the best place we can. That means that, as far as it is within our power, we should bring about a world in which every individual has the highest possible level of wellbeing."

"The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains."

"The kind of equality utilitarianism supports is given by Bentham’s formula...: ‘everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one’...Utilitarianism seeks to maximize happiness, and in deciding how to calculate whether happiness is being maximized, no one’s pleasures or pains should count for less because they are peasants rather than aristocrats, slaves rather than slave-owners, Africans rather than Europeans, poor rather than rich, illiterates rather than doctors of philosophy, children rather than adults, females rather than males, or even, as we have seen, non-human animals rather than human beings."

"The sentiment to which [the utilitarian] appeals is generalized benevolence, that is, the disposition to seek happiness, or...good consequences, for all mankind, or perhaps for all sentient beings."

"Another type of ultimate disagreement between utilitarians, whether hedonistic or ideal, can arise over whether we should try to maximize the average happiness of human beings...or whether we should try to maximize the total happiness or goodness...Would you be quite indifferent between (a) a universe containing only one million happy sentient beings, all equally happy, and (b) a universe containing two million happy beings, each neither more nor less happy than any in the first universe? Or would you, as a humane and sympathetic person, give a preference to the second universe? I myself cannot help feeling a preference for the second universe."

"[A] purely hedonistic utilitarian, like Bentham, might agree with Mill in preferring the experiences of discontented philosophers to those of contented fools. His preference for the philosopher’s state of mind, however, would not be an intrinsic one. He would say that the discontented philosopher is a useful agent in society and that the existence of Socrates is responsible for an improvement in the lot of humanity generally."

"It's the flock, the grove, that matters. Our responsibility is to species, not to specimens; to communities, not to individuals."

"Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around."

"Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, and hypothesised that the imperative was the primitive form of a verb: “walk!” precedes “to walk” or “he walks”. This opens up the possibility of an alternative ontology, or pre-ontology, based on commandment rather than assertion, on “be!” rather than “is”. While philosophical or scientific statements would fall under the ordinary “is”-based ontology, fields like law, religion or magic would operate in the imperative mode: “let there be…”"

"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions."

"One is what one is, partly at least."

"On bourgeois ground... change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se."

"The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature," and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. “Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web."

"Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epistemology, because we only understand something if we can program it, as I will explain in more detail later. And it's a paper on physics, because what we can actually compute depends on the laws of physics in our particular universe and distinguishes it from other possible universes. And it's a paper on ontology, because it shows that some real numbers are uncomputable, which I shall argue calls into question their very existence, their mathematical and physical existence."

"A sample of the modern debate, which neatly summarizes the anti-reductionist position is provided by Grene (1974). She points out that in principle a one-level ontology—the belief, for example, that with increasing knowledge all science will become an account of the world in the language of, say, atomic events—contradicts itself. This is so because such a belief, to be meaningful, requires an ontology which admits both atomic events and cognition. Here at once a second level is smuggled in! It is logically possible... that there might be no levels in between those of atomic events and cognition (that in essence is Descartes's position) but the sciences of chemistry and biology consist of some well-tested conjectures that there are such intermediate levels as are represented by molecules, cells, organelles, organs, and organisms."

"Systems is an epistemology (making a statement of the kind: 'A certain type of knowledge may be expressed in systems language') before it is an ontology (which would make a statement of the kind: 'The world is systemic'); and in the case of work whose concern is social reality it may never be possible to make ontological statements in systems terms."

"Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience."

"[Women's Liberation] ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God."

"I suggest that the rejection of ontological final causality ... has often really been a kind of metaphysical rebellion, even on the part of those philosophers who have been most disdainful of metaphysics. It has been an effort to overthrow the tyranny of the allegedly 'supernatural end' that seemed to block the dynamics of thought and action. But this 'block' was often a shallow and reified conception of the final cause. When those doing the rejecting have had no deep awareness of the dynamism in being, that is of the ontological force of final causality, the reified Block has not wholly disappeared. It has tended to reappear in various ways."

"The scientific world-view is surely a good deal less intelligible now than it was during the century or two following Newton. ...[A]lthough the Newtonian picture was that of a universe unfolding mechanically, it was underpinned by the theological concept of a Deity who had set the world in motion at the beginning. The two concepts went together and provided a satisfactory ontology for as long as the basic assumptions were acceptable. Modern science, by contrast, has no comprehensive metaphysical foundation. Indeed the paradox of modern science is this: it is a system of thought which amply displays man’s creative powers and which yet makes him appear as a 'thing'—that is, as an object which science believes can have no such powers."

"The point at issue... is whether 'time' really is, in some deep ontological sense, differentiated into past, present and future. ...Reichenbach and Whitrow propose that there is... such a type of event and this is the 'becoming', or 'coming into being' of factual states-of-affairs in the physical world. Reichenbach ...claimed that 'becoming' is in fact made manifest through the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg: "The concept of becoming, he wrote, acquires a meaning in physics: The present, which separates the future from the past, is the moment when that which was undetermined becomes determined, and 'becoming' means the same as 'becoming determined' ". Whitrow expressed ..."The past is the determined, the present is the moment of 'becoming' when events become determined, and the future is as-yet undetermined. Although neither Reichenbach nor Whitrow developed their thesis at any length, the general purport of what they meant is clear: there is a basic chance element in nature, at least at the micro-level, and the moment of 'becoming', which they identify with 'the present', is marked by a transition from what is merely possible to what is factual. However... this important attempt to provide a physical basis for the ...theory is by no means immune from criticism."

"[W]e are tempted to draw a problematic conclusion: there could be entities who do have minds but who cannot tell us what they are thinking... because they have no capacity for language... [M]inds are the ultimate terra incognita, beyond the reach of all science and—in the case of languageless minds—beyond all empathetic conversation as well. ...[H]umility ought to temper our curiosity. Don't confuse ontological questions (about what exists) with epistemological questions (about how we know about it). We must grow comfortable with this wonderful fact about what is off-limits to inquiry."

"Science doesn’t give authentically access to the Real in the ontological meaning of the word, but only to the links between phenomena."

"The British intellectual tradition is empirical and liberal, the French is rationalist and aristocratic, and the German is idealist and conservative. ...In the great ontological debate between mind and matter, German philosophy comes down solidly on the side of mind. Its emphasis is intuition as opposed to reason, ideas as opposed to facts."

"The free market system is implied, Hayek felt, by his ontology in order to attain maximum human productivity, the highest standard of living for all—the utilitarian-liberal-socialist-communist-libertarian goal. The division and paucity of individual knowledge renders a market economy necessary for optimal economic productivity. The utilization and communication of information and knowledge are critical."

"Hayek’s early work as a student in psychology (mostly before Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was published) led him to ask himself the questions: "What is mind?" and "What is the place of mind in the realm of nature?" Hayek essentially adopted a Kantian view of the nature of the world. He saw mind as implanting order on the world rather than the world necessarily having any properties of, as it were, itself. In The Sensory Order, Hayek wrote that if the "account of the determination of mental qualities which we have given is correct, it would mean that the apparatus by means of which we learn about the external world is itself the product of a kind of experience." Hayek did not ultimately ascribe much significance to the brain as an accurate (whatever, in this circumstance, accuracy would be) receptacle of reality. Reality, such as it is, is what brain makes of it. This Kantian ontological (theory of being) perspective had, in Hayek’s view, significant philosophical consequences or repercussions for epistemology. Since there is no ultimate reality apart from what brain makes of it, knowledge is not of ultimate essences but merely of mental states that themselves are liable to change during the lifetime of an organism or over the evolution of a species. Hayek’s ontology ultimately reduces the role of absolute knowledge absolutely."

"Ontology simply means: the world has its laws, and it enforces them. The mistake of the postmoderns was based on a simple confusion between ontology and epistemology, between what is and what we know about what is. It is clear that in order to know that water is H2O, I need language, schemata and categories. But water wets and fire burns whether I know it or not, regardless of languages and categories. At a certain point, there is something that resists us. This is what I call “unamendability”, the salient characteristic of the real. This may certainly be a limitation, but at the same time it provides us with the very foothold that allows us to distinguish dreams from reality and science from magic."

"The three basic principles of Plotinus' metaphysics are called by him 'the One' (or, equivalently, 'the Good'), Intellect, and Soul... These principles are both ultimate ontological realities and explanatory principles. Plotinus believed that they were recognized by Plato as such, as well as by the entire subsequent Platonic tradition. The One is the absolutely simple first principle of all. It is both 'self-caused' and the cause of being for everything else in the universe."

"Generally, position measurements sometimes reveal information about Bohmian positions, but never full information and sometimes none at all. Simple and handy criteria for determining when the Bohmian position measurements of a particle under test highly correlate with the position of the center of mass of some large pointer are still missing. Bohmian mechanics is attractive to philosophers because it provides a clear ontology. However, it is not as attractive to researchers in physics. This is unfortunate because it could inspire brave new ideas that challenge quantum physics."

"Once knowing is no longer understood as the search for an iconic representation of ontological reality but, instead, as a search for fitting ways of behaving and thinking, the traditional problem disappears. Knowledge can now be seen as something which the organism builds up in the attempt to order the as such amorphous flow of experience by establishing repeatable experiences and relatively reliable relations between them. The possibilities of constructing such an order are determined and perpetually constrained by the preceding steps in the construction. That means that the “real” world manifests itself exclusively there where our constructions break down. But since we can describe and explain these breakdowns only in the very concepts that we have used to build the failing structures, this process can never yield a picture of a world that we could hold responsible for their failure."

"Do we call the claim perception, whether it succeeds or no? Or is 'perception' a 'success word'? J. J. Gibson in his important book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, defends the view that our senses are systems for information-input from the world. ...Gibson ...interpreted his ...theory as a defence of realism. Hintikka ...objects ...that the claim for 'realism' is merely empirical; the 'logic of perception', he argues, does not demand that the actual world contain the realities of which perception informs, or seems to inform us. ...I cannot go into this argument, since it is based on the articulation of a 'possible-world ontology' which I ...find much too contrived to serve as a philosophical approach to so fundamental a feature of our experience as perceiving ...Gibson’s realistic claim ...and Hintikka’s counterclaim need to be taken seriously—with paradoxical results. 'Perception' is sometimes, justifiably, a success-word, sometimes, justifiably, not."

"The fundamental commitment behind Abelard's nominalism, that there is nothing that is not individual (or at least particular), is the conceptual core of all his metaphysical thought. Abelard held that the individual is primary, ontologically basic, and requires no explanation. It is notoriously difficult to prove such a claim. If Abelard could be said to have a metaphysical project it would be to show that other "items" that more promiscuous philosophers would add to their ontology can be reductively explained in terms of individuals (or at least of particulars)."

"[M]ethodological naturalism would then lead to extreme conservatism about ontology: no new entities should be introduced in science."

"Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available. If this were not so there could not have been as yet any ontological knowledge."

"Heidegger's Sein und Zeit [Being and Time]... develops a "fundamental ontology" according to the modes in which the self "exists,"... and originates... several meanings of Being...explicated in a number of fundamental categories... [i.e.,] "existentials"... functional structures of the active movement of inner time by which a "world" is entertained and the self [is] originated as a continuous event. The "existentials" have... a profoundly temporal meaning... [i.e.,] categories of internal or mental time, the true dimension of existence... must exhibit, and distribute between them, the three horizons of time—past, present, and future... [I]n the classical... "table of categories"... the column under... "present" remains practically empty... For the existentially "genuine" present is the present of the "situation," which is wholly defined in terms of the self's relation to its "future" and "past." It flashes up... in the light of decision, when the projected "future" reacts upon the given "past" (Geworfenheit) and in this meeting constitutes what Heidegger calls the "moment" (Augenblick): moment, not duration, is the temporal mode of this "present"—a creature of the other two horizons of time, a function of their ceaseless dynamics, and no independent dimension to dwell in. ...a derivative and "deficient" mode of existence. ...[A]ll the relevant categories of existence... having to do with the possible authenticity of selfhood, fall in correlate pairs under... either past or future... No present remains for genuine existence to repose in. Leaping off... from its past, existence projects itself into the future; faces its ultimate limit, death; returns from this eschatological glimpse of nothingness... [T]here is no present to dwell in, only the crisis between past and future... balanced on the razor's edge of decision which thrusts ahead."

"...If we had the time we should now go on to present the ingenious theory of organism with which Spinoza focused the general ontological scheme specifically on the biological sphere, where mentality is ordinarily seen to be conjoined to physical fact, and particularly on the case of man. It must be enough to say that Spinoza makes it beautifully intelligible from his general premises that the quality and power of a mind are proportionate to the complexity of the body to which it corresponds, so that the perfection of the human body as a piece of physical organization is a direct yardstick for the perfection of the human mind which, as it were, conformally (or: isomorphously) duplicates the body's physical performance on the plane of thought."

"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..."

"A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s."

"Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through : the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the , is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake."

"Descartes, by means of intuition and abstraction, seeks to establish the ultimate features of things as they are in themselves; that is, he seeks to establish an objective ontology of natures that compose material bodies."

"If the Good and the Beautiful, Peace and Justice cannot be derived either from ontological or scientific-rational conditions, they cannot logically claim universal validity and realization. In terms of scientific reason, they remain matters of preference, and no resuscitation of some land of Aristotelian or Thomistic philosophy can save the situation... the ideas become mere ideals, and their concrete, critical content evaporates into the ethical or metaphysical atmosphere."

"It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us."

"Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology."

"Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, and what is lacking is the clear vision of what should be done... What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language we must have a new reality... A new reality will generate a new language, a new language will fix a new reality, and make it part of this reality."

"Oriental religions had proposed the idea of a supreme Being beyond the grasp of language. But Greek thinkers were so wont to identify the real and the conceivable with what can be said that they dared not state there is an unintelligible reality; therefore, they made it into a non-being, thus originating the ontology of absence whose latest versions are Heidegger’s Being (always placed beyond positive existence) and its semiotic child, Derridian difference or 'trace,' forever avoiding presence and identity. The usefulness of such comparisons show that, for all the novelty of his terminology, the thought structure of Derrida is a philosophical antique with a more theological than epistemological origin—something that may remain concealed to those who broach deconstruction theory as though it were just conceptually sharpened semiotics."

"Ontology recapitulates philology."

"Man's being... is an unending struggle to accommodate himself to it. The stone... need not fight for being what it is... Man... has to make his existence at every moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality. ...Man must earn his life, not only economically but metaphysically. ...because man's being and nature's being do not fully coincide. Because man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological , half immersed in nature, half transcending it."

"For to be aware and to be are the same....And it is all one to me Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again. ...It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not. ...Helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along deaf and blind alike, dazed, beasts without judgment, convinced that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that the road of all things is a backward-turning one. ...Nor was once, nor will be, since is, now, all together, One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? In what way, whence, did grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought That is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus must either be completely or not at all. ...For this view, that That Which Is Not exists, can never predominate. You must debar your thought from this way of search, nor let ordinary experience in its variety force you along this way, ...the eye, sightless as it is, and the ear, full of sound, and the tongue, to rule; but ...judge by means of the Reason ...the much-contested proof which is expounded by me. ...[I]s now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor ...divisible, since ...all alike; nor ...any more or less ...in one place which might prevent ...holding together, but all is full of what is. ...How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it... ever... going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown. ...Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thinking apart from what is... The mortals lay down and decided well to name two forms (...the flaming light and obscure darkness of night), out of which it is necessary not to make one, and in this they are led astray."

"Math, like diamonds, truly seems to be forever. If one 'goes Platonic' with math, one has to face... philosophical consequences... the notion of goes out the window. Physicalism is the position that the only things that exist are those that have physical extension... and last time I checked, the idea of circle, or Fermat’s theorem, did not have physical extension. It is true that physicalism is now a sophisticated doctrine that includes not just material objects and energy, but also, for instance, physical forces and information. But it isn’t immediately obvious to me that mathematical objects neatly fall into even an extended physicalist ontology."

"How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard."

"The genius of culture is to create an ontological system so compelling that what is inside and outside of a person are viewed as of a piece, no seams and patches noticeable."

"The word ontology comes from the Greek ontos for being and logos for word. It is a relatively new term in the long history of philosophy, introduced by the 19th century German philosophers to distinguish the study of being as such from the study of various kinds of beings in the natural sciences. The traditional term for the types of beings is Aristotle's word category, which he used for classifying anything that can be said or predicated about anything."

"Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one... that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown."

"Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or ) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued."

"We think of the world as containing particular things some of which are independent of ourselves; we think of the world's history as made up of particular episodes in which we may or may not have a part; and we think of these particular things and events as included in the topics of our common discourse, as things about which we can talk to each other. These are remarks about the way we think of the world, about our conceptual scheme. A more recognizably philosophical, though no clearer, way of expressing them would be to say that our ontology comprises objective particulars. It may comprise much else besides."

"One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs. ... To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of . Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world."

"The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. … It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective."

"Today’s smut is tomorrow’s fine art. The profane, with the passage of time becomes sacred. Having suffered under a reactionary ontological hermeneutics for the last fifty years, the extremist movement constitutes an emergent phenomenon which is more than the sum of the processes from which it has emerged. Interpretation theory rewarded by dominant culture would have us believe that history is objective when in fact its subjective nature is based on hierarchical systems of exploitation benefiting a global elite."

"Some Vietnam veterans have told me what they did over there when they were animals. They have been giving testimony about it to the public, to juries, to judges. Some of the juries cry, and so do some of the judges... It's a rotten thing to brainwash someone into doing the dirty part of killing while we stay at home. It's a rotten thing to pretend the war is coming to an end when it's only taken to the air. And in 1972 if you don't fight against a rotten thing you become a part of it."

"As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."

"... “brainwashing” [is] a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao)... The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”"

"The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces...By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III."

"Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will? The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it."

"Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business."

"There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other."

"If you insert electrodes directly into the brains of cats and apes, they will behave like electronic toys. A whole series of motor functions can be triggered based on which button the experimenter pushes. This applies to all body parts: front and back paws, the tail, the hind parts, the head, and the ears."

"Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses."

"The radio stimulated bulls underscore the classic symbolism of the bullfighting, that is -- the triumph of intelligence over brute force, the supremacy of skill and grace over aggression and ferocity. The radio directed bulls also teach us that ancestral instincts of attack and destruction can be pacified by technology and human intelligence, giving a hope of peace that perhaps could benefit future humanity."

"We knew too little about the brain. It is much too complicated to be controlled. We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didn’t even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate."

"I had different views in the '70s. As a human being, I've learned… I have more culture now. I was dumb as a rock when I wrote 'Okie from Muskogee'... My views on marijuana have totally changed. I think we were brainwashed and I think anybody that doesn't know that needs to get up and read and look around, get their own information. It's a cooperative government project to make us think marijuana should be outlawed."

"... the term was based on the Chinese phrase ‘hsi nao’, meaning ‘to cleanse the mind’, and that this was not an official Communist phrase (it does not appear in Chinese dictionaries or newspapers) but was nevertheless said, on record, by Hunter’s Chinese informants. As Hunter would explain, ‘hsi nao’ was a clever pun on a longstanding Confucian principle, ‘hsi hsin’, to wash the heart, a metaphor that meant to prepare oneself for a quiet retirement from world affairs."

"Brainwashing is a system of befogging the brain so a person can be seduced into acceptance of what otherwise would be abhorrent to him. He loses touch with reality. Facts and fancy whirl round and change places … However, in order to prevent people from recognizing the inherent evils in brainwashing, the Reds pretend that it is only another name for something already very familiar and of unquestioned respect, such as education or reform."

"The American Psychological Association had rejected the brainwashing/mind control theories in 1987 insofar as they applied to religious movements, on the basis that they were not scientific is, therefore, perfectly accurate. It is, in fact, almost identical to [Margaret] Singer’s own statement that the rejection of the DIMPAC report was “described by the APA as a rejection of the scientific validity of the theory of coercive persuasion."

"Social scientists need not alter their definition of brainwashing, but should simply acknowledge that at least one contemporary ideological organization utilizes brainwashing in an attempt to retain its members. While this study cannot answer crucial questions about the long term implications for people who have been through this particular brainwashing program (compare Schein, 1961: 284), no doubt exists that Scientology's founder gave considerable thought to brainwashing techniques and imposed them on those of his followers whom he believed were harbouring thoughts or performing actions against him or the organization. The "brainwashing" term, therefore, has validity within some social science discourse."

"If someone took control of your mind and you were not able to think as yourself any longer, you would no longer be yourself. You'd be something in his command. You as an individual would be dead. That's Anti-Life. In other words, if you gave yourself to some cause, and gave up everything as an individual and you were at the beck and call of some leader, you would be dead as an individual. And that's what Darkseid wants. He wants control of everybody. If it was snowing outside and you weren't wearing any shoes and it was 38 degrees below zero and this guy says, "Go out and get me a bologna sandwich," you have to go through all that; you obey him automatically, you obey him meekly. You walk out without a coat and you freeze to death. He doesn't care. You do it anyway despite the fact that you don't want to do it. You're dead as an individual. You have no choice. You can't object and you have no stature as a person. You're dead. A slave is a dead man."

"Behind this web of semantic.(and more than semantic) confusion [regarding the definition of thought reform] lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism."

"Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing. The concept began as an [[Orientalism|[O]rientalist]] propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up."

"Definition of brainwashing 1: a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas 2: persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship"

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?"

"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."

"Brainwashing: (a.k.a. thought control, mind control, coercive persuasion). A non-violent method that uses mind control techniques to convince a person to abandon some of their basic beliefs and adopt the beliefs of the indoctrinator."

"Brainwashing is defined as an observable set of transactions between a charismatically-structured collectivity and an isolated agent of the collectivity with the goal of transforming the agent into a deployable agent. Brainwashing is thus a process of ideological resocialization carried out within a structure of charismatic authority."

"Given the problematic nature of scientific support for brainwashing based theories as they are applied to participants in new religions, it is reasonable to ask why such evidence was ever admitted [into court testimony], and why it is sometimes still admitted. The most plausible answer has to do with the operation of biases, prejudices, and misinformation in these cases that involve controversial parties and issues or, as Kassin and Wrightsman (1988) say: cases involving emotional topics over which public opinion is polarized."

"Thought reform contains elements which are evident in Chinese culture (emphasis on interpersonal sensitivity, learning by rote and self-cultivation); in methods of extracting confessions well known in the Papal Inquisition (13th century) and elaborated through the centuries, especially by the Russian secret police; in methods of organizing corrective prisons, mental hospitals and other institutions for producing value change; in methods used by religious sects, fraternal orders, political elites or primitive societies for converting or initiating new members. Thought reform techniques are consistent with psychological principles but were not explicitly derived from such principles."

"The capture of American GIs in the Korean War heightened the alarm. Stories coming out of Korea suggested that the Chinese and Korean communists had developed techniques of indoctrination which nobody could resist. US soldiers and airmen had allegedly been turned into fervent communists. This process became known as brainwashing. Panic gripped the popular press. Perhaps such POWs, when liberated, might return home as clandestine subversives. It was years before brainwashing was shown to be a fantasy. When captives, brutalised by torture and malnutrition, professed adherence to Marxism-Leninism they were usually calculating that a pretence of ideological conversion would stop their torment."

"An estimated 5,000 economic, political, and religious groups operate in the United States alone at any given time, with 2.5 million members. Over the last ten years, cults have used tactics of coercive mind control to negatively impact an estimated 20 million victims in the last ten years. Worldwide figures are even greater."

"Human beings have been trying to change each others' minds since they first discovered they had them. Brainwashing is more ambitious, and more coercive, than simple persuasion, and unlike older cognates such as indoctrination, it has become closely associated with modern, mechanistic technology. It is a systematic processing of non-compliant human beings which, if successful, refashions their very identities."

"Brainwashing threatens cherished notions of free will. It seems to suggest that we may not be safe anywhere, not even inside our own skulls. Since Korea it has been invoked whenever people do something especially incomprehensible."

"Say the word "brainwashing", and chances are we think of the Manchurian Candidate, of some mysterious process that installs malevolent new beliefs in people's minds - as if ideologies were just like versions of Windows...But brains are not computers, and there is no Button X that Osama and his ilk can press to turn a man from good to evil. Giving a name to the pathway from "normal" to "killer" may make us feel better, but it doesn't help us prevent any future bombings."

"One striking fact about brainwashing is its consistency. Whether the context is a prisoner-of-war camp, a cult's headquarters or a radical mosque, five core techniques keep cropping up: isolation, control, uncertainty, repetition and emotional manipulation."

"The persuasive techniques used by totalist cults to bind and exploit the members, while not magical or infallible, are sufficiently powerful and effective to assure the recruitment of a significant percentage of those approached, and the retention of a significant percentage of those enlisted."

"Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. … It seems to me that at the very heart of the controversy over the existence of mind control is a bias toward believing in the power of people to resist the power of situational forces, a belief in individual will power and faith to overcome all evil adversity. It is Jesus modeling resistance against the temptations of Satan, and not the vulnerability of Adam and Eve to deception. More recently, examples abound that challenge this person-power misattribution."

"A western citizen is being brainwashed much more than a soviet citizen ever was during the era of communist propaganda. In ideology, the main thing is not the ideas, but rather the mechanisms of their distribution. The might of the Western media, for example, is incomparably greater than that of the propaganda mechanisms of the Vatican when it was at the zenith of its power. And it is not only the cinema, literature, philosophy – all the levers of influence and mechanisms used in the promulgation of culture, in its broadest sense, work in this direction. At the slightest impulse all who work in this area respond with such consistency that it is hard not to think that all orders come from a single source of power."

"There are two rules of war that have not yet been invalidated by the new world order. The first rule is that the belligerent nation must be fairly sure that its actions will make things better; the second rule is that the belligerent nation must be more or less certain that its actions won't make things worse."

"In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign…. Secondly, a just cause…. Thirdly … a rightful intention."

"But, say they, the wise man will wage Just Wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars."

"They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill.""

"The Mahabharata, which provides the context for the Gita, clearly lays down that “non-violence is the highest duty” and describes how Krishna tries several non-violent solutions. Only when these fail due to the stubborn selfishness of the other party, and when the justice of his party’s cause is established and acknowledged even by elderly members of the opposite party, does Krishna gradually accept the second maxim, viz. that “violence is a duty against wilful evildoers”. That’s when he agrees at last to let the war begin. ... At any rate, his conduct in the whole process leading up to the start of the war is neatly compatible with the European theory of Just War, and could even be read as the earliest attempt at formulating such a doctrine of the conditions for Just War."

"Justa bella quibus necessaria."

"War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love, and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ."

"War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington -- not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict."

"Orthodox Christianity recognizes harms from both involuntary and “justifiable” homicide, including homicide in a just war, both of which incur excommunication not as punishment, but as spiritual therapy (Basil, 1983, Canon 13, pp. 801-802)."

"Modern civilization has introduced great qualifications to soften the rigours of war; and allows a degree of intercourse with enemies, and particularly with prisoners of war, which can hardly be carried on without the assistance of our Courts of justice. It is not therefore good policy to encourage these strict notions, which are insisted on contrary to morality and public convenience."

"The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II."

"All the same, the fundamental truths which govern that art are still unchangeable; just as the principles of mechanics must always govern architecture, whether the building be made of wood, stone, iron or concrete; just as the principles of harmony govern music of whatever kind. It is still necessary, then, to establish the principles of war."

"Constantine was converted to Christianity by a vision that came to him on the eve of the battle of Milvian Bridge: "He saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, 'By this sign, conquer' ". Soon the cross would morph from being a hated symbol of Roman brutality into the universally recognizable logo of the Holy Roman Empire. Within a century, St Augustine would develop the novel idea of just war, trimming the church's originally pacifist message to the needs of the imperial war machine."

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, no matter how justified, is not a crime."

"When people ask me what I did in the war, I tell them I did the same thing we all did. We fought for what was right. I've come to realize, there's nothing good about war... But there is good in why you fight wars. And we were all fighting for the same thing."

"The church has historically trusted men to make the decision about when to take life in war by giving them the “just war” theory. There is no “just abortion” theory for women. Catholics who believe in justice and equality reluctantly conclude that the absolute opposition of the church to abortion has more to do with the inequality of women in the church than with respect for life."

"The ideology of warfare that has been repeatedly invoked for the past thousand years of Western history grew out of Augustine's thesis of just war in the fifth century and continued to be developed to its complete expression in Pope Urban II's propaganda campaign launching the first Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. Simply stated in the terms of the American western, one of the great cultural institutions for fostering violence, the world is made up of good guys and bad guys, and the good guys have to shoot the bad guys for everyone's well-being. Once this was established, the state had only to declare its proposed victim a bad guy to justify a war."

"The organizing principle of any society is for war. The basic authority of the modern state over its people resides in its war powers. Today it's oil, tomorrow, water. It's what we like to call the GOD business: Guns, Oil, and Drugs. But there is a problem. Our way of life, its over. It's unsustainable and in rapid decline. That's why we implement demand destruction. We continue to make money as the world burns. But for this to work the people have to remain ignorant of the problem until it's too late. That's why we have triggers in place: 9/11, 7/7, WMDs. A population in a permanent state of fear does not ask questions. Our desire for war becomes its desire for war. A willing sacrifice. You see, fear is justification, fear is control, fear is money."

"Justum est bellum, quibus necessarium; et pia arma, quibus nulla nisi in armis relinquitur opes."

"But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice – a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice – is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."

"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences. And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence. Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of "just war" was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God."

"Every decision to launch a war, even if it is the most justified and clear decision, is never easy. [...] It should not be utilized in the political race of those who wish to rise to power even at the price of baseless self-destruction, which lacks logic and boundaries – all this around a war which was the most justified."

"It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged. * * * We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in."

"We must not let what happened lead to a deepening of divisions. Religion must never be used as a reason for conflict. [...] With all my heart I beg God to keep the world in peace. From this place, I invite both Christians and Muslims to raise an intense prayer to the One, almighty God whose children we all are, that the supreme good of peace may reign in the world."

"I say: NO TO WAR! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between states, the noble exercise of diplomacy; these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences. I say this as I think of those who still place their trust in nuclear weapons, and as I think of the all too numerous conflicts which continue to hold hostage our brothers and sisters in humanity. Bethlehem reminds us of the unresolved crisis in the Middle East, where two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, are called to live side by side, equally free and sovereign, in mutual respect. Faced with the constant degeneration of the crisis in the Middle East, I say to you that the solution will never be imposed by recourse to terrorism or armed conflict, as if military victories could be the solution. And what are we to say about the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than 12 years of embargo? War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations. As the charter of the United Nations Organisation and international law itself remind us, war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations."

"When war, as in these days in Iraq, threatens the fate of humanity, it is ever more urgent to proclaim, with a strong and decisive voice, that only peace is the road to follow to construct a more just and united society. Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men."

"The Seeger Court recognized that the exemption provision needed to “deal[] with the beliefs of different individuals who will articulate them in a multitude of ways,” and focused its test simply on the sincerity of the individual’s conscientious objection. Even this broadened approach to conscientious objection remains focused on individuals who are opposed to participating in any war, as opposed to those who are opposed to participating in a particular war. This leaves certain people who have moral objections to participation in particular wars—for example, someone who subscribes to “just war theory,” which condemns some, but not other, wars—without protection."

"Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!"

"Women have long been props for war-making. Invasions are often justified in part by pointing to the suffering of women in the countries targeted for attack. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” Laura Bush said when she took over her husband’s weekly radio address, in 2001, to urge Americans to support the war in Afghanistan. Like McMaster’s miniskirt photograph, Bush’s speech exemplifies the kind of pseudo-feminism sometimes used to justify invasion. The literary theorist and postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak calls it “white men saving brown women from brown men,” an imperial logic that ignores sexism at home to fight sexism abroad, and which disregards brown women’s agency and self-understanding. How women make sense of the situations in which they live—whether, for instance, they see the veil as oppressive or as a symbol of resistance or simply as an important religious practice—is irrelevant. Instead, imperialism is presented as a necessary act of deliverance. They don’t know how to treat their women; our job—really, our moral obligation—is liberation."

".מלחמת שלום הגליל היתה מהמוצדקות ביותר במלחמות ישראל"

"The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

"War can only be abolished through war … in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."

"The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people."

"We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times."

"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise."

"In 2007, for the first time ever, more information was generated in one year than had been produced in the entire previous five thousand years - the period since the invention of writing."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use."

"Information is not a substance or concrete entity but rather a relationship between sets or ensembles of structured variety."

"... we simply try to give you all of the information about our businesses, in a large general way, that Charlie and I would want if our positions were reversed. ... The facts are out about what we do."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"Wisdom is dead. Long live information."

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

"The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."

"people cannot take action if they don't have accurate information."

"Information is not lost in black holes, but it is not returned in a useful way. It is like burning an encyclopaedia. Information is not lost, but it is very hard to read."

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information."

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

"It used to be said that information is power. As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the board of the New York Times Co., rightly says, "Information is now ubiquitous. Power is understanding.""

"There's no going back, and there's no hiding the information. So let everyone have it."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled. As it turns out, after the first 50,000-year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up—between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled. As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point sometime around 2015 where human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam."

"Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?"

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

"Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists."

"You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information."

"Data, seeming facts, apparent asso­ciations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all."

"Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society."

"Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune."

"Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man's life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self."

"Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity."

"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

"If you look for an identity you find inequality. If you look for similarities you separate one truth from another."

"When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity."

"There is nothing so certain to lead to inequality as identity."

"I don't blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they'll realize there's more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously."

"If you’ve ever sat in a room with twins, immediately you’re forced to deal with this confusion. You’re afraid to call them by name because you’re afraid you’re going to get it wrong. At first being a twin is a source of power, you can switch, you can fool people—but then it becomes a vulnerability because people confuse you when you don’t want them to. The famous story of the twins who were both spanked when either one of them did something wrong because the parents wanted to make sure they got the right twin. So that would immediately make each twin totally responsible for the other one’s actions and therefore would make you want to control the other twin’s actions. It gets quite twisted and the confusion of identities becomes quite intense."

"Too many women throw themselves into romance because they're afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won't do that."

"Positioning one's own identity in relation to the existence of the other is sickness. If you need an enemy to keep your identity alive, your identity is sick. Original: Kendi kimliğini ötekinin varlığına göre konumlandırmak hastalıktır. Kimliğini yaşatmak için sana bir düşman gerekiyorsa, senin kimliğin hastalıklıdır."

"We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us."

"When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases."

"This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature."

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

"A sense of identity is the gift of love, and only love can give it."

"Doesn't the world see the suffering of millions of Palestinians who have been living in exile around the world or in refugee camps for the past 60 years? No state, no home, no identity, no right to work. Doesn't the world see this injustice?"

"My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify."

"I don't know how tall I am or how much I weigh. Because I don't want anybody to know my identity. I'm like a superhero. Call me Basketball Man."

"The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth."

"I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me."

"The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening."

"I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement."

"Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been … destroyed by sudden environmental change."

"Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction."

"All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody."

"Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man."

"Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity."

"Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."

"Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons."

"The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive."

"It strikes me that self, not just my self, but all self, the phenomenon of self, is perhaps one field, one consciousness – perhaps there is only one ‘I’, perhaps our brains, our selves, our entire identity is little more than a label on a waveband. We are only us when we are here. At this particular moment in space and time, this particular locus, the overall awareness of the entire continuum happens to believe it is Alan Moore. Over there – [he points to another table in the pizza restaurant] – it happens to believe it is something else. I get the sense that if you can pull back from this particular locus, this web-site if you like, then you could be the whole net. All of us could be. That there is only one awareness here, that is trying out different patterns. We are going to have to come to some resolution about a lot of things in the next twenty years time, our notions of time, space, identity."

"What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas."

"In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered."

"All who are guided b the spirit of God are sons [daughters] of God, for what you received was not the spirit of slavery to bring you back into fear, you received the spirit of adoption, enabling us cry out “Abba , father”"

"Paraphrased: Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God."

"My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe."

"The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness."

"We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”"

"To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability."

"Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Go lightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it?"

"My identity has everything to do with me and my instrument. It doesn't have to do with what production style I use, or how many people played on it, whether it's sparse or grandiose or whatever. And I'm social, frankly."

"When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It's like death."

"We need to reflect the true identity of Muslims, how peaceful they are and really be able to talk to the Western media about the true look and heart of the Muslims."

"A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self."

"A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied."

"From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own."

"Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be."

"He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to the thing I cannot get."

"An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it."

"Did not Nietzsche too warn of that “life-destroying enlightenment” that touches on our life-supporting self-delusions? Can we afford to shake up the “basic fictions” of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the “stance” of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their “unavoidable lies for living,” without which self-preservation would not be possible. That they are aided in this by the general fear of self-experience, which competes with curiosity about self-experience, does not have to be expressly emphasized."

"The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counterenlightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden, partially open conservatism that has inscribed personal identity, occupational identity, national identity, political identity, female identity, male identity, class identity, party identity, etc., on its banner."

"The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility’s cultural “identity.” This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections."

"Growing has no connection with audience. Audience has no connection with identity. Identity has no connection with a universe. A universe has no connection with human nature."

"It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you."

"And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself."

"Human nature, human nature acts as it acts when it is identified when there is an identity but it is not human nature that has anything to do with that it is that anybody is there where they are, it is that that has to do with identity, with government and propaganda with history with individualism and with communism but it has nothing nothing to do with the human mind … because the human mind writes what there is and what has identity go to do with that … nothing at all."

"To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity."

"An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion."

"If you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into “me” and “mine”: you make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity."

""Forgiveness" is a term that has been in use for 2,000 years, but most people have a very limited view of what it means. You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past. Only through accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power, can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are... When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. You do not need it anymore. Presence is the key. The Now is the key."

"Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. … The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2."

"Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity and resistance to self-pity."

"Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership."

"To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also become more positive..."

"I don't cover my face because I want to show my identity."

"Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now."

"If the reality we experience is the only thing that we have experienced, how do we know that there isn’t anything beyond our reality?"

"Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation. In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means."

"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying."

"... nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real. In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy."

"Shinji: I don't understand. I don't understand what reality is."

"Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone — it's not understanding what actually is going on in the world."

"You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion."

"The relation of the soul to the Oversoul is that of the part towards the Whole, and it is this relation and its consequent recognitions, which develop into that sense of oneness with all beings and with the supreme Reality to which the mystics have always testified."

"I would like to remind you that the fact that you see the world picture as one of outstanding chaos, of striving ideologies and warring forces, of the persecution of minorities, of hatreds which are working out into a furious preparation for war, and of world anxiety and terror does not really mean that you are seeing the picture as it is in reality. You are seeing what is superficial, temporal, ephemeral and entirely concerned with the form aspect."

"Suddenly the real was no longer merely a stepping stone to the possible. The real was all there was."

"The Real – with its vast volumes of nothing between the planets, stars, systems and galaxies – was basically mostly vacuum; an averaged near-nothing incapable of true complexity due to its inescapable impoverishment of structure and the sheer overwhelming majority of nothingness over substance."

"Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true."

"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions."

"Nothing is more real than nothing."

"My God, how can you stand such things, children? They say, "Mom, don't you know it is only television, it is not real.""

"We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality."

"He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality."

"REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum."

"I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"Whoever believes that the only important reality is the realm of ideas, of the spirit, should not occupy himself with science. The scientist must be a realist, he must accept his sense impressions as more than hallucinations, as messages of a real outer world. In disentangling these messages he uses ideas of a very abstract kind, group theory in spaces of many or even infinitely many dimensions and things like that, but finally he has his observational invariants representing real things with which he learns to operate like any craftsman with his wood or metal."

"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"

"I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person... but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict. Both sides/ideas are right. Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish."

"Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality."

"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?"

"I’m not one of those fools who think that by ignoring reality you can make it go away."

"There's times to be real, and there's times to be phony. That's right, I said it, phony! You think I'm this nice in real life?"

"If... the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality."

"Sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it. p. 69"

"Realities are very often more miraculous than dreams"

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

"Normally, we take our reference frame for granted; we mistake it for “reality.”"

"... Is this world real? This is a venerable philosophical issue and I do not wish to be embroiled in the finely honed squabbles to which it has led. I merely state my own working hypothesis: that there is indeed an outside world, and that it is largely independent of our observing it. We can never fully know this outside world, but we can obtain approximate information about some aspects of its properties by using our senses and the operations of our brains. Nor, as we shall see, are we aware of everything that goes on in our brains, but only of some aspects of that activity. Moreover, both these processes—our interpretations of the nature of the outside world and of our own introspections—are open to error. We may think we know our motives for a particular action, but it is easy to show that, in some cases at least, we are in fact deceiving ourselves."

"Already in 1948, observations... agreed with quantum mechanics, not with local realism."

"There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality."

"Il n'est rien de réel que la rêve et l'amour."

"Materialistically bound, traditional science assumes that anything that cannot be measured, tested in a laboratory, or probed by the five senses or their technological extensions simply doesn't exist. It's "not real." The consequence: all of reality has been collapsed into physical reality. Spiritual, or what I would call nonphysical, dimensions of reality have been run out of town."

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"Reality can be bent, but it will not break."

"One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts."

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

"All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics – indeed, of modern science altogether."

"One may say "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.""

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth."

"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have."

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

"One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. ... Don't stop to marvel."

"My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance"

"Realism is the premise of criticism, while irrealism is characterised by acquiescence, the fairy tale told to children to help them fall asleep. (p. 30)"

"We have always had a great deal of difficulty understanding the world view that quantum mechanics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old enough man that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me. Okay, I still get nervous with it.... You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem."

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

"Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible."

"In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.... Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal. Wherein is the cause for quarrelling?"

"Everything in this world is "PHURO" - transient. It has no reality. True reality is to proceed on the path of truth, to keep the company of saintly people, and to render service to men."

"The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

"We think that we have been alive since a certain point in time and that prior to that moment, our life did not exist. This distinction between life and non-life is not correct. Life is made of death, and death is made of life. We have to accept death; it makes life possible. The cells in our body are dying every day, but we never think to organize funerals for them. The death of one cell allows for the birth of another. Life and death are two aspects of the same reality. We must learn to die peacefully so that others may live."

"Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept which can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence."

"The foolish read to escape reality; the wise surrender to it."

"I deny this reality. The reality is a computation matrix."

"“You ask if anyone has ‘tested the concept.’ But why would anyone test reality? Reality is not for testing, but for living with.”"

"Einstein's fundamental dispute with the Bohr-Heisenberg crowd over quantum mechanics was not merely about whether God rolled dice or left cats half dead. Nor was it just about causality, locality, or even completeness. It was about reality."

"For the moment, what we attend to is reality."

"Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake."

"One of the greatest powers in the world is the ability to define reality and cause others to accept it. This power is even increased although negatively when one can define reality and make others accept it even when it is to their disadvantage."

"And he knew by what Plato called Divine madness, or a direct contact with nonphysical reality; myths were one result of this last kind of knowing."

"Love is basic for the very survival of mankind. I’m convinced that love is the only absolute ultimately; love is the highest good. He who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of ultimate reality. He who hates does not know God; he who hates has no knowledge of God. Love is the supreme unifying principle of life."

"Reality can take a flying f. at a rolling doughnut."

"She’d once told Devon, “I'm more interested in things that are real.” He’d been playing the game. Monitor-glow made his head a silhouette. He said, “What’s real is just an accident. No one designed reality to be compelling.” He gestured to the screen. “But a fantasy world is so designed. It takes the most interesting things that ever existed—like knights in armor and pirates on the high seas—and combines them with the most interesting things that anyone ever dreamed up—fire-breathing dragons and blood-drinking vampires. It’s the world as it should be, full of wonder and adventure. To privilege reality simply because it is reality just represents a kind of mental parochialism.”"

"You cannot search for reality, or for what you will, in isolation. It comes into being only in relationship, only when there is right relationship between man and man. So the love of man is the search for reality."

"Reality does not discuss, it simply is."

"It doesn’t have to be New York; it could have been Kokomo. I think the point is that having a fictional character come from a real place makes the character seem more real. When I was young, I loved to read Sherlock Holmes. And the fact that he lived on Baker Street in London, a real place, made me enjoy the stories more, with a greater feeling of authenticity."

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

"Only true meditation can reveal the Real."

"[R]ealism. You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong."

"Your goals, minus your doubts, equal your reality."

"It is not the form of things that must be attended to but their spirit. The real is what matters, not the apparent. In politics, reality is that which is unseen."

"In the real world, people die. And no self promoting asshole in a fucking leotard can stop it."

"The scientific method — apart from a narrowly agnostic and pragmatist point of view — is therefore by itself incomplete and insufficient: it demands in order to make contact with reality the complement of some metaphysic or other."

"The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have."

"Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know."

"You will ask why I speak against magic when I myself discuss the cementing of space, the significance of the circle’s influence, and other conditions reminiscent of magic. The difference is that magic offers a substitute for life, while We teach people to make reality better by taking advantage of the possibilities that life itself provides. 195."

"Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is."

"Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

"The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past."

"Every citizen... could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police... The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time... They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they... were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening."

"Neither my deeds have any contents, nor, my gestures have sense of zeal, my days are walking forth in worthlessness. with this body deficient of heart and soul how can I come close to you O' Glorious! O' Lord Almighty!"

"The jnani, following the path of knowledge, always reason about the Reality saying, "not this, not this." Brahman is neither "this" nor "that"; It is neither the universe nor its living beings. Reasoning in this way, the mind becomes steady."

"A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps."

"Hudson: Movies, television, video games...These days, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not."

"Some people think that we are stuck in physical reality like flies in flypaper or victims in quicksand, so that each motion we make only worsens our predicament and hastens our extinction. Others see the universe as a sort of theater into which we are thrust at birth and from which we depart forever at death. In the backs of their minds people with either attitude will see a built-in threat in each new day; even joy will be suspect because it, too, must end in the body's eventual death. I used to feel this way. When I fell in love with Rob, my joy served to double the underlying sense of tragedy I felt, as if death mocked me all the more by making life twice as precious. I saw each day bringing me closer to a total extinction that I could hardly imagine, but which I resented with growing vehemence."

"It is important to show the reality of the Teaching, to prove to what an extent it can alter the character and life of a person. Long ago it was said, "Faith without deeds is dead." Thus, the Teaching without application to life will bring no benefit."

"So what is reality, one more time? An incompressible computation by a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions. And where is this huge computation taking place? Everywhere; it’s what we’re made of."

"So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?” Reality is made of gnarly computations."

"There is no reality but God, says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings."

"You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open."

"Witnessing such a sorry state of affairs is by no means a monotonous, monochromatic activity... There is something profoundly unsettling about an intellectual such as Chomsky who has neither an office to protect nor territory to consolidate and guard. There is no dodging the inescapable reality that such representations by intellectuals will neither make them friends in high places nor win them official honors. It is a lonely condition, yes, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things are."

"If you ever become fatigued from chasing your dreams, you are always welcome in my world of reality."

"Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them...there is nothing."

"Illusions will not last. Their death is sure, and this alone is certain in their world. It is the ego’s world because of this. What is the ego? But a dream of what you really are. A thought you are apart from your Creator and a wish to be what He created not. It is a thing of madness, not reality at all. A name for namelessness is all it is. A symbol of impossibility; a choice for options that do not exist."

"Thoughts can represent lower-order or higher-order reality. This is the basic distinction between intellectualizing and thinking. One makes the physical and the other creates the spiritual, and we believe in what we make or create. p. 2"

"Fantasy is a distorted form of vision. Fantasies of any kind are distortions, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Actions that stem from distortions are literally the reactions of those who know not what they do. Fantasy is an attempt to control reality according to false needs."

"Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they are frightened because they do not know the difference. p. 132"

"The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs. If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real."

"Many things are narrated in Scripture as real, and were believed to be real, which were in fact only symbolical and imaginary."

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

"Finding Your Invisible And Indestructible Reality. our physical form is part of the illusion, so how can the body, the physical form, bring you to a realization of Being? The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into Being. But that visible and tangible body is only an outer shell, or rather a limited and distorted perception of a deeper reality. In your natural state of connectedness with Being, this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible inner body, the animating presence within you. So to "inhabit the body' is to feel the body from within, to feel the life inside the body and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form. p. 72"

"All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came."

"Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly."

"Each of us lives,dependent and bound by our individual knowledge and our awareness. All that is what we call reality, however, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies."

"Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain...that it is juicy...and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."

"The combination of these two facts — the longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it — constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality. Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect. This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world's reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also."

"It from bit."

"Reality... What A Concept!"

"Recognizing that “reality” is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences-rebels risk losing their jobs, failing in school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering social ostracism."

"Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he were Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly, there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things."

"It from qubit."

"All men by nature desire to know; the proof of this is the pleasure caused by sensations, for even apart from the usefulness, we enjoy them for themselves, and visual sensations more than the others."

"One man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature. In a word, one man sees all things apart and in fragments, whilst another strives to discover the harmony, connection, unity of all. One of the great evils of society is, that men, occupied perpetually with petty details, want general truths, want broad and fixed principles."

"Before all other things, man is distinguished by his pursuit and investigation of Truth. And hence, when free from needful business and cares, we delight to see, to hear, and to communicate, and consider a knowledge of many admirable and abstruse things necessary to the good conduct and happiness of our lives: whence it is clear that whatsoever is True, simple, and direct, the same is most congenial to our nature as men. Closely allied with this earnest longing to see and know the truth, is a kind of dignified and princely sentiment which forbids a mind, naturally well constituted, to submit its faculties to any but those who announce it in precept or in doctrine, or to yield obedience to any orders but such as are at once just, lawful, and founded on utility. From this source spring greatness of mind and contempt of worldly advantages and troubles."

"It is essential to every inquiry about duty that we keep before our eyes how far superior man is by nature to cattle and other beasts: they have no thought except for sensual pleasure and this they are impelled by every instinct to seek; but man's mind is nurtured by study and meditation."

"Nature outweighing art begets roughness; art outweighing nature begets pedantry. Art and nature well blent make a gentleman."

"He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human.""

"The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one is the healthy attitude of human nature."

"Anarchists trust the best instincts of the people, and human nature dictates that where there is repression there will be resistance; where there is slavery, there will a struggle against it."

"Thus we discover that this blind and impersonal process produced humans not in a lightning flash, not in a sudden instant of creation, but as the result of accumulation. The origin of humans is not something that can be pinpointed at five million years, or one million years, or 100,000 years in the past, but, rather, occurs continuously over time. Our origin is the whole pattern of evolution, although there are key events that we must discover and identify. The things that make us human are acquired as a complex mosaic—we became upright four million years ago; we began to make tools two million years ago; we began to live all over the earth less than one million years ago; and possibly we only acquired language in the last 100,000 years or so. Each of these factors is an essential part of the process of becoming human. What makes human evolution such an endlessly fascinating story is trying to visualize the stages, imagining what sort of a creature could walk upright but not talk, make tools but not use fire, survive the rigors of the Ice Age but know nothing of agriculture and a settled way of life."

"Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde."

"History often reproduces without reference to nationality some particular human type or class which becomes active and predominant for a time, and fades away when its task is finished. It is, however, not utterly lost, for the germ of it lies dormant yet ready to re-appear when the exigencies of the moment recall it. The reserve forces of human nature are inexhaustible and inextinguishable."

"Human nature is intractable stuff, hard jagged stuff, the kind of stuff that dreams are wrecked on."

"It is human nature to avoid being consumed by hypotheticals until they are staring us squarely in the face."

"The nature of man doesn’t change, and that’s reassuring, since we know the necessary conditions that can save him from himself."

"The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature."

"There is a startling similarity between Bacon’s prescription for mastering nature—“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed”—and Loyola’s formula for manipulating men—“Follow the other man’s course to your own goal.”"

"Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution."

"Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not the result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them."

"Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed."

"Human nature is not of itself vicious."

"Nature … has born and reared all men alike, and created them genuine brothers, not in mere name, but in very reality, though this kinship has been put to confusion by the triumph of malignant covetousness, which has wrought estrangement instead of affinity and enmity instead of friendship."

"The needs of man, if life is to survive, are usually said to be four -- air, water, food, and in the severe climates, protection. But it is becoming clear today that the human organism has another absolute necessity... This fifth need is the need for novelty -- the need, throughout our waking life, for continuous variety in the external stimulation of our eyes, ears, sense organs, and all our nervous network."

"Humane nature I always thought the most useful object of humane reason, and to make the consideration of it pleasant and entertaining, I always thought the best employment of humane wit: other parts of philosophy may perhaps make us wiser, but this not only answers to that end, but makes us better too. Hence it was that the Oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all men living, because he judiciously made choice of human nature for the object of his thoughts; an enquiry into which as much exceeds all other learning, as it is of more consequence to adjust the true nature and measures of right and wrong, than to settle the distance of the planets, and compute the times of their circumvolutions."

"Our human nature is made out of peace, and peace is what we are made for. All troubles are in fact caused by the disruption of our original condition, which is both our origin and our destiny."

"Therapeutic re-education … teaches the patient-student how to live with the contradictions that combine to make him into a unique personality; this is does in contrast to the older moral pedagogies, which tried to re-order the contradictions into a hierarchy of superior and inferior, good and evil. ... What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis if full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature."

"Human nature is governed by general self-interest and affected by genetic predisposition, which implies that there are likely to be limits to our moral sensitivities."

"In Aristotle the conception of human nature is perfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development."

"Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping-point. The false has no limits. When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless. Recall your steps, therefore, from idle things, and when you would know whether that which you seek is based upon a natural or upon a misleading desire, consider whether it can stop at any definite point. If you find, after having travelled far, that there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be sure that this condition is contrary to nature."

"Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of the state necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too."

"Human nature is the same now as when Adam hid from the presence of God; the consciousness of wrong makes us unwilling to meet those whom we have offended."

"It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured."

"You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back."

"We're just like other people: We love to sing, we love to dance, we admire beautiful women. We are human, and sometimes very human."

"Ancestral humans behaved like Bonobos. Later, when we developed the family system, the use of sex for this sort of purpose became more limited, mainly occurring within families. A lot of the things we see, like pedophilia and homosexuality, may be leftovers that some now consider unacceptable in our particular society."

"God consecrates us with His Spirit; whom He adopts, He anoints; whom He makes sons, He makes saints; He doth not only give them a new name, but a new nature. God turns the wolf into a lamb; He makes the heart humble and gracious; He works such a change as if another soul did dwell in the same body."

"Human nature is evil; its goodness derives from conscious activity. Now it is human nature to be born with a fondness for profit. Indulging this leads to contention and strife, and the sense of modesty and yielding with which one was born disappears. One is born with feelings of envy and hate, and, by indulging these, one is led into banditry and theft, so that the sense of loyalty and good faith with which he was born disappears. One is born with the desires of the ears and eyes and with a fondness for beautiful sights and sounds, and, by indulging these, one is led to licentiousness and chaos, so that the sense of ritual, rightness, refinement, and principle with which one was born is lost. Hence, following human nature and indulging human emotions will inevitably lead to contention and strife, causing one to rebel against one’s proper duty, reduce principle to chaos, and revert to violence. Therefore one must be transformed by the example of a teacher and guided by the way of ritual and rightness before one will attain modesty and yielding, accord with refinement and ritual, and return to order."

"Prior to the 17th century the terms ["deism" and "deist"] were used interchangeably with the terms "theism" and "theist", respectively. … Theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth century began to give a different signification to the words.... Both [theists and deists] asserted belief in one supreme God, the Creator.... and agreed that God is personal and distinct from the world. But the theist taught that god remained actively interested in and operative in the world which he had made, whereas the deist maintained that God endowed the world at creation with self-sustaining and self-acting powers and then abandoned it to the operation of these powers acting as second causes."

"There are many who confess that while they believe like the Turks and the Jews that there is some sort of God and some sort of deity, yet with regard to Jesus Christ and to all that to which the doctrine of the Evangelists and the Apostles testify, they take all that to be fables and dreams.... I have heard that there are of this band those who call themselves Deists, an entirely new word, which they want to oppose to Atheist. For in that atheist signifies a person who is without God, they want to make it understood that they are not at all without God, since they certainly believe there is some sort of God, whom they even recognize as creator of heaven and earth, as do the Turks; but as for Jesus Christ, they only know that he is and hold nothing concerning him nor his doctrine."

"I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism make me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not, for I have never read their writings; mine will therefore determine the matter; for I have not in the least disguised my sentiments, but have written freely without any conscious knowledge of prejudice for, or against any man, sectary or party whatever; but wish that good sense, truth and virtue may be promoted and flourish in the world, to the detection of delusion, superstition, and false religion; and therefore my errors in the succeeding treatise, which may be rationally pointed out, will be readily rescinded."

"Let reason count the stars, weigh the mountains, fathom the depths — the employment becomes her, and the success is glorious. But when the question is, "How shall man be just with God?" reason must be silent, revelation must speak; and he who will not hear it assimilates himself to the first deist, Cain; he may not kill a brother, he certainly destroys himself."

"As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."

"My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist."

"[T]he Rev. R. Taylor, A.M., the Deist, now in gaol, infamously persecuted by the Whigs for his religious opinions, in his learned defense of Deism called the Diegesis, has clearly proved all the heirarchical institutions of the Christians to be a close copy of those of the Essenians of Egypt."

"Just as AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created - this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as/well, are implicitly talking about."

"Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism."

"Who ever heard of a devout deist? Who ever heard of one who was willing to spend his life in missionary labor for the good of others? It is not according to the constitution of the mind that such a system should awaken the affections. And what is true of this system is true of every false system. All such systems leave the heart cold, and, accordingly, exert very little genuine, transforming power over the life."

"There is probably no argument by which the case for theism, or for, deism, or for pantheism in either its pancosmic or acosmic form, can be convincingly proved."

"A less important point which needs to be made in this piece is that although the index of The God Delusion notes six references to Deism it provides no definition of the word ‘deism’. This enables Dawkins in his references to Deism to suggest that Deists are a miscellany of believers in this and that. The truth, which Dawkins ought to have learned before this book went to the printers, is that Deists believe in the existence of a God but not the God of any revelation. In fact the first notable public appearance of the notion of Deism was in the American Revolution."

"Some will say Thomas Jefferson was a deist, not an atheist. Atheism, however, simply involves having no theism, and deism — belief that a celestial Clockmaker wound up the universe and set it ticking — is too watery a theism to count. Any religion worthy of the name explains, enjoins and consoles; undemanding deism merely explains, and does this minimally."

"In Emerson's case, we know who the god was — even his name and address. His utterances are too highly differentiated for mistake. The divine voice is of course one. All things are one to Emerson. But the one in this instance seems sufficiently distinguished from its other articulatenesses to involve a polytheistic rather than a generally immanent explanation. To us the god is inescapably Emerson himself; it is at least excusable, practically, to identify what you find in no other conjunction. Naturally the inference is that we are all gods, and no doubt Emerson would willingly have adopted, with whatever modifications, the current “panentheism” which unites his pantheism with theism, for though he never lost sight of the existence of the many he always saw them as ultimately resident in the one."

"Various advocates and critics of panentheism find evidence of incipient or implicit forms of panentheism present in religious thought as early as 1300 BCE. Hartshorne discovers the first indication of panentheistic themes in Ikhnaton (1375–1358 BCE), the Egyptian pharaoh often considered the first monotheist. In his poetic description of the sun god, Ikhnaton avoids both the separation of God from the world that will characterize theism and the identification of God with the world that will characterize pantheism … Early Vedantic thought, as well as some modern Indian thought, implies panentheism in non-Advaita forms that understand non-dualism as inclusive of differences."

"It is impossible to place any high value on mental work, unless we believe that it has a cosmic setting, and that behind human undertakings there is the support of a Divine Power. Thus religious conviction is looked upon with no disfavour, but it is rather an admission of infinity into man's finite life, an acknowledgment of an unseen order of things, than a movement toward a new world not to be gained save through shock and revolution. There is much closer kinship to Panentheism, the creed of the noblest minds of the Renaissance, than to the distinctively Christian view which these men incline to look upon as a mere refuge for the weak and sickly. Religion for them is rather an invisible Presence which attends their work than a specific form of spiritual experience."

"The panentheistic God/universe setup is like a mutual admiration society: God needs you, and you need God. … God depends on the world, and the world depends on God … Since God is always growing, or "in process," he never perfectly achieves his aims. In metaphorical terms, God is always on the path but he never reaches his destination. The actual is what he is; the potential is what he is eternally becoming."

"These distinctions make sense only when AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is assumed (hence Spinoza's failure, who assumed mere A). Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created — this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as/well, are implicitly talking about."

"It is important here to underscore panentheism (with the en in the middle) which is not to be confused with 'pantheism' (without the 'en' in the middle). The former signifies the immanent nature of God without a transcendent spirit, whereas the latter is nature worship characteristic of many pagan faiths, at least as characterized by their opponents. Panentheism refers to the world as God and at the same time God remaining transcendent. This dual character of God is central to integral unity. God is the unchangeable transcendent and also everything that exists, and hence ever in flux. Charles Hartshorne, a prominent philosopher and theologian, introduced the term 'panentheism' into the Western lexicon after his detailed study of Hindu metaphysics in the 1930s (especially Ramanuja and Sri Jiva Goswami)."

"Since God is continuously present, why do you worry? For in Him we live and move. We are carried in His arms. We breathe God; we are vested with God; we touch God; we consume God in the Mystery. Wherever you turn, wherever you look, God is everywhere: in the heavens, on the earth, in the abysses, in the trees, within the rocks, in your nous, in your heart."

"God is everywhere. There is no place where God is not. The more you pay attention to Him, the more He pays attention to you. You cry out to Him, “Where art Thou, my God?” And He answers, “I am present, my child! I am always beside you.” Both inside and outside, above and below, wherever you turn, everything shouts, “God!” In Him we live and move. We breathe God, we eat God, we clothe ourselves with God. Everything praises and blesses God. All of creation shouts His praise. Everything animate and inanimate speaks wondrously and glorifies the Creator. Let every breath praise the Lord!"

"How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?"

"He who believes this (atomism) may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them."

"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."

"The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

"Events may appear to us to be random, but this could be attributed to human ignorance about the details of the processes involved."

"Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word."

"Randomness is a very, very subtle concept with its study properly belonging to statisticians more than mathematicians."

"Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."

"Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance."

"The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked."

"Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe — in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance."

"Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random."

"The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random."

"A random sequence is a vague notion in which each term is unpredictable to the uninitiated and whose digits pass a certain number of tests traditional with statisticians and depending somewhat on the uses to which the sequence is to be put."

"Quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier."

"For I do not believe that it is through the interference of Divine Providence … that the spittle of a certain person moved, fell on a certain gnat in a certain place, and killed it."

"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us."

"Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."

"One of us recalls producing a 'random' plot with only 11 planes, and being told by his computer center's programming consultant that he had misused the random number generator: 'We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we don’t guarantee that more than one of them is random.' Figure that out."

"The definition of random in terms of a physical operation is notoriously without effect on the mathematical operations of statistical theory because so far as these mathematical operations are concerned random is purely and simply an undefined term."

"While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information."

"The Avatar appears in different forms, under different names, at different times, in different parts of the world. As his appearance always coincides with the spiritual birth of man, so the period immediately preceding his manifestation is always one in which humanity suffers from the pangs of the approaching birth."

"Whether there have been 26 Avatars since Adam, or 124,000 Prophets, as is sometimes claimed, or whether Jesus Christ was the last and only Messiah, or Muhammad the last Prophet, is all immaterial and insignificant when eternity and reality are under consideration. It matters very little to dispute whether there have been ten or twenty-six or a million Avatars. The truth is that the Avatar is always one and the same, and that the five Sadgurus bring about the advent of the Avatar on earth. This has been going on cycle after cycle, and millions of such cycles must have passed by, and will continue to pass by, without affecting eternity in the least."

"Irrespective of doubts and convictions, and for the Infinite Love I bear for one and all, I continue to come as the Avatar, to be judged time and again by humanity in its ignorance, in order to help man distinguish the Real from the false."

"When I say I am the Avatar, there are a few who feel happy, some who feel shocked, and many who hearing me claim this, would take me for a hypocrite, a fraud, a supreme egoist, or just mad. If I were to say every one of you is an Avatar, a few would be tickled, and many would consider it a blasphemy or a joke. The fact that God being One, Indivisible and equally in us all, we can be nought else but one, is too much for the duality-conscious mind to accept. Yet each of us is what the other is. I know I am the Avatar in every sense of the word, and that each one of you is an Avatar in one sense or the other. It is an unalterable and universally recognized fact since time immemorial that God knows everything. God does everything, and that nothing happens but by the Will of God. Therefore it is God who makes me say I am the Avatar, and that each one of you is an Avatar. Again, it is He Who is tickled through some, and through others is shocked. It is God Who acts, and God Who reacts. It is He Who scoffs, and He Who responds. He is the Creator, the Producer, the Actor and the Audience in His own Divine Play."

"Oh, never star Was lost here, but it rose afar! Look East, where whole new thousands are! In Vishnu-land what Avatar?"

""Waverley" was the avater of a new era ;"

"India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root in the consciousness of the people. All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the supreme being of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. 66"

"The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract."

"The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority."

"Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case."

"The restriction of rationality to the use of means which is legitimized by this view [positivism], entails that the other aspect of the practical problematic, the realm of ends, falls prey to pure decisionism, the whim of mere decisions not reflected upon by reason. The decisionism of unreflected, arbitrary decisions in the realm of practice corresponds to the positivism implied by the restriction to pure value-free theories in the realm of cognition."

"The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth."

"The simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts."

"What is metaphysics? Let us explain clearly: if by metaphysics, in the broadest sense of the word, we mean “the general theory of the universe”, that theory which, in other words, embraces and explains all its manifestations, then positivism, which proclaims itself to be the negator and destroyer of metaphysics, has itself created a complete and proper metaphysics."

"Positivism and ordinary language analysis … repel students who come with the humanizing questions. Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students."

"Whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist."

"If the positivist model of scientific knowledge is false, does it mean that the only cure is a thoroughgoing relativism? For the record, positivism is not the only game in town in the natural or social sciences. It is not the only conception of science. Marx's critique of bourgeois philosophy, political economy, and utopian socialism is the first stage leading to the affirmation of a dialectical materialist conception of science. Marx's rejection of empiricism, as the epistemological basis for science, is fundamentally a discarding of the empiricist premise—that science is exclusively descriptive and devoid of prescriptive tasks. The concepts of exploitation, class struggle, and the theory of reification, for example, possess both a descriptive and normative (critical) aspect for Marx. After all, Marx made it very plain: Capital is A Critique of Political Economy. Hence, Hume's fork has no place at a Marxist dinner table."

"Two aspects of this older positivist view ... lack validity and impede understanding: ... the notion of a timeless based on rigorously objective observation and logic, and ... that earlier systems were either theory-free or theory-poor because explanation can only follow accurate description."

"If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make reality the basis of our philosophy? I would say that I am a realist in the sense that I think there is a universe out there waiting to be investigated and understood. I regard the solipsist position that everything is the creation of our imagination as a waste of time. No one acts on that basis. But we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory. I therefore take the view, which has been described as simple-minded or naive, that a theory of physics is just a mathematical model that we use to describe the results of observations. A theory is a good theory if it is an elegant model, if it describes a wide class of observations, and if it predicts the results of new observations. Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory. This view of scientific theories may make me an instrumentalist or a positivist --- as I have said above, I have been called both. The person who called me a positivist went on to add that everyone knew that positivism was out of date --- another case of refutation by denigration. It may indeed be out of date in that it was yesterday's intellectual fad, but the positivist position I have outlined seems the only possible one for someone who is seeking new laws, and new ways, to describe the universe. It is no good appealing to reality because we don't have a model-independent concept of reality."

"Then philosophy was supposed to be the handmaiden of theology, humbly accepting its achievements, and asked to bring them into a clean logical order and present them in a plausible, conceptually demonstrable context. Now, philosophy is supposed to be the handmaiden of the other sciences. … Its task is to demonstrate the methods of the sciences."

"Was vernünftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig."

"In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world."

"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry."

"With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, be synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it."

"The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics."

"For positivism, which has assumed the judicial office of enlightened reason, to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle. Positivism—fortunately for it—does not need to be atheistic, since objectified thought cannot even pose the question of the existence of God. The positivist censor turns a blind eye to official worship, as a special, knowledge-free zone of social activity, just as willingly as to art—but never to denial, even when it has a claim to be knowledge. For the scientific temper, any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender."

"If organized science had completely yielded to the Nordic requirements, and had accordingly crystallized a consistent methodology, positivism would eventually have had to accept it, just as elsewhere it has accepted the patterns of empirical sociology shaped by administrative needs and conventional restrictions."

"How is it possible to determine what justly may be called science and truth, if the determination itself presupposes the methods of achieving scientific truth? The same vicious circle is involved in any justification of scientific method by the observation of science. … Doubtless the logical fallacy at the very root of the positivist attitude merely betrays its worship of institutionalized science. … If science is to be the authority that stands firm against obscurantism, … philosophy must formulate the concept of science in a way that expresses human resistance to the threatening relapse into mythology and madness, rather than further such a relapse by formalizing science and conforming it to the requirements of the existing practice."

"The positivist command to conform to facts and common sense instead of to utopian ideas is not so different from the call to obey reality as interpreted by religious institutions, which after all are facts too."

"One voice in the Great Conversation itself announces this modern point of view. In the closing paragraph of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume writes: "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume … let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." …the positivists of our own day, would commit to burning or, what is the same, to dismissal from serious consideration... Those books... argue the case against the kind of positivism that asserts that everything except mathematics and experimental science is sophistry and illusion. ...The Great Conversation... contains both sides of the issue..."

"All of this positive [knowledge] fails to express the state of the knowing subject in existence, hence it pertains to a fictive objective subject, and to mistake oneself for such a subject is to be fooled and remain fooled."

"The radical empiricist onslaught … provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior."

"Der Hautausschlag ist so positiv als die Haut."

"The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity."

"The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen."

"Despite its value to Einstein and Heisenberg, positivism has done as much harm as good. But, unlike the mechanical worldview, positivism has preserved its heroic aura, so that it survives to do damage in the future."

"Where then does this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of positivism, this time applied to the study of science itself. If one refuses to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then quantum field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws of nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and sociologists and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior of real scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple description in terms of rules of inference. But scientists have the direct experience of scientific theories as desired yet elusive goals, and they become convinced of the reality of these theories."

"The idea of the postmodern ... was in one way or another an appanage of the right. ... For Lyotard the very parameters of the new conditions were set by the discrediting of socialism as the last grand narrative. ... There could be nothing but capitalism. The postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions."

"Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals."

"At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: "I now see that we can nothing know." That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial data it is a piece of self-deception."

"The final dismantling of the great master narratives is itself a grand narrative—why else would people get so excited about it?"

"For about a couple of decades I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends: "Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false?", and nobody's answered it yet."

"Surely at least some of our logical principles … are far more evident and obvious to us than are any of the empirical generalizations we find in psychology, or in any other of the empirical sciences. Thus, to attempt to explain logic in terms of psychology is to explain the more certain by the less certain. It is, in short, to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius."

"There is an obscurum per obscurius problem as well. In order to know whether or not giraffes are taller than ants we must first know (a) whether or not there is a consensus that giraffes are taller than ants, and (b) if there is, whether or not the communication that produces that consensus was free, open, and undistorted. But isn’t it obvious that it is easier to determine whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to determine either (a) or (b)? Or, to put it another way, wouldn’t any skeptical doubts about our ability to determine even something so obvious as that giraffes are taller than ants also be more than sufficient to wipe out any hope of being able to know about the outcome, and degree of openness, of any process of public communication?"

"Is it easier to know what our culture’s epistemic norms are in terms of which it is to be determined whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to know that giraffes are taller than ants? Is our knowledge concerning the identity of those norms to be construed on a realist model, or must we rather consult our culture’s epistemic norms in order to use them to figure out the identity of those norms? If the former, why is it that we can have objective knowledge concerning the identity of our culture’s epistemic norms when we can’t have it with regard to the relative height of giraffes and ants? And if the latter, how is an infinite regress to be avoided?"

"Postmodernism has found full political and social realisation. Recent years have taught us a bitter truth – namely, that the primacy of interpretations over facts, the overcoming of the myth of objectivity, has been achieved, but it has not had the emancipatory results prophesied by professors. [...] The real world has certainly become a fairy tale, or rather [...] it has become a “reality”, but the result has been media populism, a system in which (provided you have the power) you can claim to make people believe anything. In television news and talk shows, we have witnessed the reign of “There are no facts, only interpretations”, which – with what is unfortunately a fact and not an interpretation – has shown its true meaning: “The strongest argument is always the best”. (pp. 5-6)"

"Thinking about my own sense of identity, I realise that it has always depended on the fact of being a migrant. ... Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred. What I've thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is "coming home" with a vengeance! Most of it I much enjoy—welcome to migranthood."

"Through a vicious circle of pure reason skepsis itself becomes dogma."

"There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?"

"Despite the best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming arms of the new power."

"Simplifying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the processes of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers."

"Whether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivist evidence, if such evidence is available. Any innocent readers who find themselves in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence."

"Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives."

"Postmodernism has made it fashionable to deconstruct what its adherents called the 'grand narratives' of history, seeing these as little more than the stories of the triumph of Western progress which was largely achieved by suppressing or violently overthrowing other groups. More problematically, postmodernists advocate that all identities be dismantled or blurred and view all positively distinctive cultures as being oppressive to weaker or less assertive ones. This idea might at first seem reasonable, especially when viewed through a postcolonial or subaltern lens, but it opens the door to a pervasive cynicism and narrowness of vision with no workable criteria of value in aesthetics, politics or philosophy. The postmodern insistence on denying such identities as Indian and Western leaves non-Western cultures vulnerable to even further exploitation because they are denied the security of possessing a difference which is real and defensible. Postmodernism, then, tends to undermine the particular reality of the non-Western culture that might be in need of being affirmed, protected and developed."

"Postmodernism resembles dharma philosophies in several ways. Both, for example, are frameworks for the deconstruction of identity. Also, both approaches share the notion that all concepts are mental constructions which are ultimately empty or devoid of self-existence. Many of the postmodern thinkers have been influenced by these Indian traditions. But there is at least one important difference: Dharma deconstructs the individual ego whereas postmodernism deconstructs the collective cultural identity. Furthermore, postmodernism lacks the yoga of the dharma traditions as a means to achieve a state of consciousness transcending differences experientially. This process is far more challenging than merely a matter of discursive deconstruction as an intellectual exercise."

"The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props."

"The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. … Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism."

"The only way forward from Postmodernism is as a reaction against it—not a reaction in the sense of destruction (what could be more Postmodernist than destruction of destruction?), but reaction as “backing away from the edge.” Postmodernism is the abyss of nihilism, a place with nowhere further to go, and in which going only leads to more nothingness. The abyss consumes, convincing those who gaze on it that it is the truth—but it is not inescapable. We can back away from it. Backing away from this abyss necessarily amounts to backing into meaning—and into an understanding of poetry that has existed across all cultures through all of human history. That function is to find meaning in the world through beauty—expressing the inexpressible in words. In this respect, ironically, poetry implicitly acknowledges the Postmodern doctrine of the insufficiency of language. But that has never posed an insurmountable problem until Postmodernism. All prior poetry used the language available to express as closely as it could the ideas that inspired it."

"She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.”"

"In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages."

"In old times, you see, a man who wanted to educate himself—a Frenchman, for instance—would have set to work to study all the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way. But in our day he goes straight for the literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of negation, and he's ready."

"Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves."

"Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it. (...) To take 'liberties' with the signature of Marx is in this sense merely to enter into the freedom of Marxism."

"We are all Marxists now"

"One of the intellectual charms of Marxism is that it explains the injustice or philistinism of the people in such a way as to exculpate the people, who are said to be manipulated by corrupt elites."

"As I noted earlier, when we look back at the scientific and public climates of discussion 50 years ago, the prevailing mindset was socialist in its underlying presupposition that government offered the solution to social problems. But there was a confusing amalgam of Marxism and ideal political theory involved: Governments, as observed, were modeled and condemned by Marxists as furthering class interests, but governments which might be installed 'after the revolution', so to speak, would become both omniscient and benevolent. In some of their implicit modeling of political behavior aimed at furthering special group or class interests, the Marxists seemed to be closet associates of public choice, even as they rejected methodological individualism. But how was the basic Marxist critique of politics, as observed, to be transformed into the idealized politics of the benevolent and omniscient superstate? This question was simply left glaringly unanswered. And the debates of the 1930s were considered by confused economists of the time to have been won by the socialists rather than by their opponents, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both sides, to an extent, neglected the relevance of incentives in motivating human action, including political action."

"The development of Marxism from the form in which it was evolved by Marx himself, before 1848 in Germany and France and afterwards in England, through the glosses of Engels and through Lenin's reformulation of the doctrine in the early years of the present century, down to its apotheosis as the ideology of the victorious Russian revolution, first under Lenin, later under Stalin, is a fascinating study. Nowadays the impact of current emotions has unfortunately made it fashionable to tell the story in terms of betrayal. According to some, true Marxism was betrayed by Lenin when he proclaimed the socialist revolution in an economically backward, predominantly peasant, country. According to others, Lenin, the faithful disciple of Marx, had his legacy betrayed and distorted by Stalin. Only the stalwarts dare to pretend that there has been no "betrayal" at all."

"Marx enriched the venerable myth by a whole Judaeo-Christian messianic ideology: on the one hand, the prophetic role and soteriological function that he attributes to the proletariat; on the other, the final battle between Good and Evil, which is easily comparable to the apocalyptic battle between Christ and Antichrist, followed by the total victory of the former. It is even significant that Marx takes over for his own purpose the Judaeo-Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to history;…[38]"

"As for their [Marxists'] argument for revolution – the argument that we must do evil now so that good may come of it in the long run – it seems to me to have nothing in it. Not because I am too nice to do evil, but because I don't believe the Communists know what leads to what."

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

"That is putting it rather narrowly, for Marxism and its successors, Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, cannot be judged on their economic performance alone. The human costs were far more horrendous. These ideologies, when put into practice, may well have brought about the premature deaths, during the 20th century, of almost 100 million people. The number who survived but whose lives were stunted bythese ideas and the repression they justified is beyond estimation. There can be few examples in history in which greater misery resulted from better intentions. The sign that went up on an East German factory wall just after the Berlin Wall came down was entirely appropriate—if long overdue: "To the workers of the world: I am sorry." There hardly needed to be a signature."

"Encompassing a broad spectrum of economic and historical views, Marxist politics seek to apply the theories of Karl Marx to political practice. Class struggle and the need of transition to a society based on common ownership of the means of production characterize these ideologies."

"As the Marxist movement splintered and mutated into new forms, Left intellectuals and activists began to look for new ways to attack capitalism. Environmental issues, alongside women’s and minorities’ issues, came to be seen as a new weapon in the arsenal against capitalism."

"You just tell the German bourgeoisie that I shall be finished with them far quicker than I shall with Marxism... When once the conservative forces in Germany realize that only I and my party can win the German proletariat over to the State and that no parliamentary games can be played with Marxist parties, then Germany will be saved for all time, then we can found a German Peoples State."

"Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual, or individual effort, of efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community. All great inventions, discoveries, achievements were first the product of an individual brain."

"Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion — how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history."

"I never had a Marxist phase. If I did it lasted a weekend, and it must have been a hell of a weekend because I don't remember it."

"Marxism and nationalism coexisted peacefully in the German countries and it was perhaps only a question of time and circumstances when these two ideologies with their fervent admiration for State and Society would merge into one, and National Socialism would arise as a bastard child of Marx and Wagner-Treitschke."

"Marx, although a man of broad knowledge, had one blind spot: he was ignorant of the true character of economics. He did not realize that economics can only be understood in close relationship to the other humanities (and certain sciences), and therefore should not be studied in vacuo. Ironically, this very weakness was largely instrumental in making Marxism successful. Marxist economics—yet another instance of a false but clear idea—can be explained to the merest child in a matter of minutes. (Conversely, to explain the workings of the free market economy to an adult would take weeks of hard work.) Because it was easily grasped, Marxism flooded the world within a few decades, as had other simplistic ideologies and religions, such as Islam and the Enlightenment; this same sort of simplicity gave rise to the French Revolution and national socialism. Christianity, on the other hand, took three centuries to triumph."

"Our results may be summarised as follows: (1) The superiority of Marxian economics in analysing Capitalism is not due to the economic concepts used by Marx (the labour theory of value), but to the exact specification of the institutional datum distinguishing Capitalism from the concept of an exchange economy in general. (2) The specification of this institutional datum allows of the establishment of a theory of economic evolution from which a "necessary" trend of certain data in the capitalist system can be deduced. (3) Jointly with the theory of historical materialism this theory of economic evolution accounts for the actual changes occurring in the capitalist system and forms a basis for anticipating the future."

"We cannot help but greet socialism (Marxism – Communism) as an excellent comrade of Freemasonry for ennobling mankind, for helping to further human welfare. Socialism and Freemasonry, together with Communism are sprung from the same source."

"In the general collapse of values all around us it is not surprising that Marxism should also be subjected to critical attacks. A failure in the eyes of its enemies, even many of its friends admit that it is going through a severe crisis. Certain self-styled 'orthodox' Marxists, more in love with the letter than the spirit of the writings of Marx and Engels, have provided the less scrupulous critics of Marxism with weighty arguments. However, this category of 'academic Marxists' is becoming less and less numerous, and today we can observe their place being increasingly taken by people with far less knowledge and even greater pretensions: half-a-dozen quotations lifted from this or that popular pamphlet serve them instead of doctrine, and represent in their eyes the sum total of Marxist science. Most of the anti-Marxists of our day reveal the same intellectual poverty."

"The real crisis through which Marxism is passing is not due to this relaxation of intellectual discipline on the part of some of those who call themselves followers of Marx. Unfortunately, the habit of praising or blaming without knowledge of the subject is becoming increasingly common to men of all parties today. This is not due to the failure of this or that doctrine, but to the crisis through which our whole civilisation is passing. At the same time this regrettable tendency adds greatly to the confusion in which all the sociological disputes of our day are taking place."

"Let us define what we mean by Marxism. Is it the doctrine of Marx and Engels? Or is it the movements to which that doctrine has given birth, and which, rightly or wrongly, claim to be Marxist? To what extent are these movements actually inspired by Marxism, and to what extent have they caused it to develop, sometimes reforming, sometimes deforming it? Are these movements still really Marxist in the classic sense? Or do perhaps both friends and enemies of Marxism often harbour a distorted conception of Marx’s original theories? We must therefore ask ourselves whether the so-called crisis of Marxism is not in large measure a crisis of differing posthumous interpretations of Marxism. Karl Marx died in 1883 and Friedrich Engels in 1895. Although a number of their followers have developed their doctrines and provided important supplementary analyses of the modifications experienced by capitalism in the course of the twentieth century, the results of these labours have hardly affected the movement as a whole. In fact, as the movement grew in size, the assimilation even of the ideas of Marx and Engels themselves, which were naturally better known, became slower, more fragmentary and more superficial. In accordance with historical conditions which obviously differed considerably as between country and country, each movement took what best suited it from the original doctrine, and applied its choice (very rarely the Marxist method itself) to its own particular situation."

"Marxism is not a dogma at all; it is a method of investigation. Seeing that the conditions of our day differ considerably from those studied by Marx, what are the new problems which contemporary Marxism has to solve? They certainly cannot be solved by reeling off a few quotations learned by heart."

"The Marxian theory of ideology predicts that the ruling ideas in any well functioning society will be ideas that promote the interests of the ruling class in that society, i.e., the class that is economically dominant. By the “ruling ideas” we should understand Marx to mean the central moral, political and economic ideas that dominate discussion in the mass media and in the corridors of power in that society. The theory is not peculiar to Marx, since the “classical realists” of antiquity like the Sophists and Thucydides advanced essentially the same theory: the powerful clothe their pursuit of self-interest in the garb of morality and justice. When Marx says that, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (The German Ideology) and that, “Law, morality, religion are to [the proletariat] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests” (The Communist Manifesto), he is simply translating in to Marxian terms the Sophistic view “that the more powerful will always take advantage of the weaker, and will give the name of law and justice to whatever they lay down in their own interests.” (W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (1971), p. 60)"

"Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations — such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers."

"Marxist theory offers us a reliable instrument enabling us to recognize and combat typical manifestations of opportunism. But the socialist movement is a mass movement. Its perils are not the product of the insidious machinations of individuals and groups. They arise out of unavoidable social conditions. We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself – certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice."

"It is generally only after their death that the scientific value of most great thinkers is fully recognized. Time gives them their full importance. But there is a very particular reason why, as the day on which we lost the author retreats further into the past, Marxist theory increasingly penetrates social strata and finds new partisans. Marxist theory is nothing but the scientific reflex of the class struggle engendered by capitalism with the inevitability of a law of nature. The continuous extension and the growing strength of this theory are consequences of the law of capitalist development discovered by Marx: any country where capitalism has penetrated or the class struggle has begun is a new field opened to Marxist influence. And this is why today, twenty-five years after Marx’s death, the thunder of the Russian Revolution announces that thanks to capitalism a vast territory has just been annexed to Marxist thought."

"“Marxist Communism, in spite of its explicit atheism and dogmatic materialism, has a markedly messianic structure and message… Some of the analogies between Marxism and traditional Christian eschatology have been described, in a slightly ironical vein, by the English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who contends that Marx adapted the Jewish messianic pattern of history to socialism in the same way that the philosopher-theologian St. Augustine (AD 354-420) adapted it to Christianity. According to Russell, the materialistic dialectic that governs historical development corresponds -- in the Marxist scheme -- to the biblical God, the proletariat to the elect, the Communist party to the church, the revolution to the Second Coming, and the Communist Commonwealth to the millennium… The similarities are founded on actual historical contacts… and also on the fact that they are variations of the same social dynamics and of a basic myth…”"

"Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel."

"With the demise of Marxism, the illusion that we can finally dispense with the notion of antagonism has become widespread. This belief is fraught with danger, since it leaves us unprepared in the face of unrecognized manifestations of antagonism."

"Obviously, Tony never became a Marxist even when he soon after decided to champion social democracy as his last act. But these comments were a far cry from his former dismissal of Marxism as a delusional politics with theory playing only the role of indefensible apologetics for terror. All the same, Tony did not feel that his standard bearing for social democracy required much more than moralistic rhetoric in its defense. His grudging admission of Marxism’s relevance for social democracy in the past did not lead him to insist on some new theory justifying his politics now. (In fact, Tony feared that given continuing injustice the most likely outcome for the foreseeable future was Marxism’s revival in theoretical debates.) Tony doesn’t appear to have contemplated that his struggle to reinvent the model of the intellectual committed him, if only to ward off Marxism, to some other return to the tradition of social thought that had defined “theory” until postmodern intellectuals gave the word a different meaning and bad name."

"The contribution of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to socialism was a theory that purported to show why the kingdom of equality was not only desirable and feasible but inevitable. To advance this claim, they resorted to methods borrowed from the natural sciences, which had gained immense prestige in the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels formulated a doctrine of “scientific socialism,” which asserted that the ideal of a propertyless, egalitarian society was something that not only should happen but, by virtue of the natural evolution of the economy, had to happen. The Marxist concept of social evolution arose under the influence of the Darwinian theory formulated in 1859 in On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s book depicted the emergence of biological species as due to a process of natural selection that enabled them better to survive in a hostile environment. The process was a dynamic one, evolving species from lower to higher stages according to determinable rules. This theory was quickly adapted by students of human behavior, giving rise to a school of “evolutionary sociology” that depicted history as a progression, “by stages,” from lower to higher forms. So great was Darwin’s influence on Marx that Engels, speaking at his friend’s funeral, said, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature so did Marx discover the law of human history.”"

"The injection of evolutionary thinking into socialist theory introduced into it the element of inevitability. According to “scientific socialism,” human actions may somewhat retard or accelerate social evolution, but they cannot alter its direction, which depends on objective factors. Thus, for reasons that will be spelled out below, capitalism in time must inexorably yield to socialism. The emotional appeal of this belief is not much different from the religious faith in the will of God, inspiring those who hold it with an unshakable conviction that no matter how many setbacks their cause may suffer, ultimate victory is assured. It would hold especial attraction for intellectuals by promising to replace spontaneous and messy life with a rational order of which they would be the interpreters and mentors. As Marx put it in a celebrated dictum, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” And who is better qualified to “change” it intelligently than intellectuals? For all its formal commitment to the scientific method, Marxism violated its most basic feature, namely open-mindedness and a willingness to adjust theory to new evidence. (Bertrand Russell called Bolshevism, an offspring of Marxism, a “religion” and spoke of its “habit of militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters.”) It was a rigid doctrine, dismissive of different views. Marx made no secret of his attitude toward those who disagreed with him: criticism, he once wrote, “is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy.” Marxism thus was dogma masquerading as science."

"The similarity between Marxism and neoconservatism might be expressed in the following way: both perspectives say that certain injustices can't be cured under our present system of political democracy and mixed economy. The Marxist concludes that we have to overthrow the present system and the neoconservative concludes that we have to live with the injustices. But they are both wrong."

"Marxism has tremendous appeal in the Third World for exactly the same reason it had tremendous appeal to me in college. It gives you something to believe in when what surrounds you seems unbelievable. It gives you someone to blame besides yourself. It's theoretically tidy. And, best of all, it's fully imaginary so it can never be disproved."

"In the unity of justice, equality and security, justice is, in my opinion, the fundamental concept. Those Marxists who, albeit in perfect good faith, argue that Marxism is not a theory of justice are therefore wrong, because the unequal distribution of surplus value and its very production do not derive from unfair distributive choices, but from mechanisms that are completely independent of ethics. If Marxism wants to survive, it must become a theory of justice, although in my opinion not in a neo-contractualist or neo-utilitarian form. Contrary to what the “aristocratic rebel” Nietzsche thought, the demands for equality and security are not at all in conflict with justice, but are in fact absolutely organic elements of its specification. After all, even children know that in the last two hundred years, no one has ever become a revolutionary after understanding the mechanism of Marx's theory of value, but always and only because of a demand for meaning, a request for perspective and a reaction to injustice, inequality and insecurity."

"Crude thinkers in the United States, and moreover honest and intelligent men who are not crude thinkers, but who are oppressed by the sight of the misery around them and have not deeply studied what has been done elsewhere, are very apt to adopt as their own the theories of European Marxian Socialists of half a century ago, ignorant that the course of events has so completely falsified the prophecies contained in these theories that they have been abandoned even by the authors themselves."

"So, at the outset at least, we can then identify two types of exteriority: first, the exteriority of within or, if you prefer, ‘on this side’—en deçà—or ‘before’; in other words, a type of exteriority whose crowning feature is organic status, from which death can return us to the inorganic. Second, the exteriority of ‘beyond’—au-delà—which reflects what this organism finds in front of it as a work object, a need and the means to satisfy it, in order to maintain its status as organism. Thus, we have a dialectic with three terms. This requires us to describe interiorization of the exterior by the organism, in order to understand its capacity to re-exteriorize in transcendent being, in carrying out an act of work or determining a need. So there is only one moment called interiority, which is a kind of mediation between two moments of transcendent being. However, we should not think that these two moments are in themselves necessarily distinct, other than for temporal reasons. Ultimately it is the same being, the same being in exteriority, which mediates with itself, and it is this that is interiority. As this mediation defines the space in which the unity of two types of exteriority will occur, it is necessarily immediate to itself in the sense that it does not contain its own knowledge. Consequently, it is at the level of this mediation, which is not itself mediated, that we encounter pure subjectivity. And it is from this starting point, taking account of a number of Marxist themes, that we need to reach a better understanding of the status of this mediation. Does it have a role in human development as a whole? Does it really exist as an indispensable moment in a dialectic crowned by objective knowledge? Or is it merely an epiphenomenon? In putting these questions, we are not bringing in from outside a notion of subjectivity that is not present in Marx; on the contrary we are rendering explicit and taking up a notion that was already given in Marxism itself with the concepts of need, work and enjoyment, even though it went unrecognized by some idealist objectivists such as Lukács."

"Marxism, as the formal framework of all contemporary philosophical thought, cannot be superseded."

"It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought."

"The most important political vision was that of communist utopia. At war's end, it had been seventy years since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had penned their most famous lines: "Workers of the World Unite!" Marxism had inspired generations of revolutionaries with a summons to political and moral transformation: an end to capitalism and the conflict that private property was thought to bring, and it replacement that would liberate the working masses and restore all of humanity an unspoiled soul. Each dominant political order was challenged by new social groups formed by new economic techniques. The modern class struggle was between those who owned factories and those who worked in them. Accordingly, Marx and Engels anticipated that revolutions would begin in the more advanced industrial countries with large working classes, such as Germany and Great Britain. By disrupting the capitalist order and weakening the great empires, the First World War brought an obvious opportunity to revolutionaries. Most Marxists, however, had by then grown accustomed to working within national political systems, and chose to support their governments in time of war. Not so Vladimir Lenin, a subject of the Russian Empire and a leader of the Bolsheviks. His voluntarist understanding of Marxism, the belief that history could be pushed onto the proper track, led him to see the war as a great chance. For a voluntarist such as Lenin, assenting to the verdict of history gave Marxists a license to issue it themselves. Marx did not see history as fixed in advance but as the work of individuals aware of its principles. Lenin hailed from largely peasant country, which lacked, from a Marxist perspective, the economic conditions for revolution. Once again, he had a revolutionary theory to justify his revolutionary impulse. He believed that colonial empires had granted the capitalist system an extended lease on life, but that a war among empires could bring general revolution. The Russian Empire rumbled first, and Lenin made his move."

"Marxism is the capitalism of the working class."

"Marxism would be a phenomenon of little more than historical interest, seeing that it has failed even in its principal stronghold, were it not so closely akin to National Socialism. National Socialism would have been inconceivable without Marxism."

"There are no laws of history beyond truisms. It is not just the Marxist answer that is wrong. Any single answer is wrong."

"Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of religious life, it has been continuously used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people."

"Marxism is still regarded by purists as a form of scientific materialism, but it is not. The perception of history as an inevitable class struggle proceeding to the emergence of a lightly governed egalitarian society with production in control of the workers is supposed to be based on an understanding of the subterranean forces of pure economic process. In fact, it is equally based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature. Marx, Engels, and all the disciples and deviationists after them, however sophisticated, have operated on a set of larger hidden premises about the deeper desires of human beings and the extent to which human behavior can be molded by social environments. These premises have never been tested. To the extent that they can be made explicit, they are inadequate or simply wrong. They have become the hidden wards of the historicist dogma they were supposed to generate. Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very few unstructured drives. They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation. A few otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is dangerous, at least to their concept of progress. I hope that I have been able to show that this perception is profoundly wrong. At the same time, anxiety about the health of Marxism as a theory and a belief system is justified. Although Marxism was formulated as the enemy of ignorance and superstition, to the extent that it has become dogmatic it has faltered in that commitment and is now mortally threatened by the discoveries of human sociobiology."

"Some call it Marxism – I call it Judaism."

"First of all I'd like to thank The Struggle and the IMT for giving me a chance to speak last year at their Summer Marxist School in Swat and also for introducing me to Marxism and Socialism. I just want to say that in terms of education, as well as other problems in Pakistan, it is high time that we did something to tackle them ourselves. It's important to take the initiative. We cannot wait around for any one else to come and do it. Why are we waiting for someone else to come and fix things? Why aren't we doing it ourselves? I would like to send my heartfelt greetings to the congress. I am convinced Socialism is the only answer and I urge all comrades to take this struggle to a victorious conclusion. Only this will free us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation."

"Contrary to the accepted Marxist interpretation, Hitler was not an opponent of Marxism and did not want to destroy it because he was "inimical to labour" but because he was caught up in the insane idea that Marxism was an instrument of the Jews for the achievement of world domination, and above all because he rejected internationalism, "pacifism" and the negation of the "personality principle" by Marxism."

"While attempts at marrying Marxism with Confucianism date back to the early 20th century, at the core of "Xi Jinping's thought on culture" lies what he calls the "second combination" between Marx and Confucius, presented as much deeper and more persuasive than the first."

"I am no more messiah than you The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is... the mark of a fake messiah."

"Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place."

"Everywhere in the world people were expecting the latter coming of one or another kickshaw messiah who would remove the discomforts which they themselves were either too lazy or too incompetent to deal with; and nobody had anything whatever to gain with electing for peculiarity among one's fellow creatures and a gloomier outlook."

"Whether it be a lamb having its throat cut ritually, or a Messiah nailed to a cross and "dying for your sins". Somebody should tell all of Yahweh's followers, Jews and Christians, that there is no such thing as a free lunch."

"Again, the next day, John stood with two of his disciples. And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned, and seeing them following, said to them, “What do you seek?” They said to Him, “Rabbi” (which is to say, when translated, Teacher), “where are You staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where He was staying, and remained with Him that day (now it was about the tenth hour). One of the two who heard John speak, and followed Him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his own brother Simon, and said to him, “We have found the [a]Messiah” (which is translated, the Christ)."

"The real crazies who are looking for a messiah... after an hour or so they realize I'm not it and go off and look somewhere else."

"I forgot to tell you — the spice exists on only one planet in the entire universe. A desolate, dry planet with vast deserts. Hidden away within the rocks of these deserts are a people known as the Fremen, who have long held a prophecy that a man would come, a messiah who would lead them to true freedom. The planet is Arrakis, also known as Dune."

"Even on important issues, like Moon's claiming to be the messiah, there are church members whom I met, including a close aide to Moon, who demur. A religious leader whom they respect and whose theology they believe, yes; the messiah, perhaps not."

"I fancy that this moment Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakesper's person."

"Having lived all my life in a country swarming with messiahs, I have been mistaken, perhaps quite naturally, for one myself, especially by the others. It would be hard to imagine anything more preposterous. I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. Further than that, I have had no interest in the matter whatsoever. <!-- It has never given me any satisfaction to encounter one who said my notions had pleased him. My preference has always been for people with notions of their own. I have believed all my life in free thought and free speech—up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable."

"Now, you listen here: 'e's not the Messiah, 'e's a very naughty boy! Now, go away!... Brian: I'm not the Messiah! Arthur: I say you are, lord, and I should know, I've followed a few! ...Brian: ...Will you please listen? I'm not the Messiah! Do you understand? Honestly! Woman: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity! Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right, I am the Messiah! Crowd: He is! He is the Messiah! Brian: Now, F.O."

"Christ – This term was taken from the pagan dictionary and originally meant "Initiate" or "Hierophant". The Christ is our highest and most purified ego. The word meant the highest divine principle in man. The Krestos, or neophyte, went through the sufferings and passed the tests of initiation and after being anointed, emerged as Christ, "the purified". "His finite personality was fused with his infinite individuality, and he then became an immortal Ego.""

"Jesus Christ was the supreme example of authentic anarchy — the creative non-violent anarchist par excellence — working not from the top down, but from the bottom up with the poor, and the poorest of the poor, to empower people and enable them to realize their potential, as men and women made in the images of God."

"The insidious tricks of the enemy may disturb you, but the humility and humanity of Christ should console you. This man emphasizes how high above you Christ has been lifted up; Christ, though, says how low he came down to you."

"The Father willed that these two, the God Christ and the Church, should be one man. All men are one man in Christ, and the unity of the Christians constitutes but one man. And this man is all men, all men are this man; for all are one, since Christ is one."

"In order to understand the Scriptures, it is absolutely necessary to know the whole, complete Christ, that is, Head and members. For sometimes Christ speaks in the name of the Head alone … sometimes in the name of His body, which is the holy Church spread over the entire earth."

"Though absent from our eyes, Christ our Head is bound to us by love. Since the whole Christ is Head and body, let us so listen to the voice of the Head that we may also hear the body speak. He no more wished to speak alone than He wished to exist alone, since He says: “Behold, I am with you all days, unto the consummation of the world” (Matt. 28:20). If He is with us, then He speaks in us, He speaks of us, and He speaks through us; and we too speak in Him."

"Christ’s whole body groans in pain. Until the end of the world, when pain will pass away, this man groans and cries to God. And each one of us has part in the cry of that whole body. Thou didst cry out in thy day, and thy days have passed away; another took thy place and cried out in his day. Thou here, he there, and another there. The body of Christ ceases not to cry out all the day, one member replacing the other whose voice is hushed. Thus there is but one man who reaches unto the end of time, and those that cry are always His members."

"What does the Scripture mean when it tells us of the body of one man so extended in space that all can kill him? We must understand these words of ourselves, of our Church, or the body of Christ. For Jesus Christ is one man, having a Head and a body. The Saviour of the body and the members of the body are two in one flesh, and in one voice, and in one passion, and, when iniquity shall have passed away, in one repose. And so the passion of Christ is not in Christ alone; and yet the passion of Christ is in Christ alone. For if in Christ you consider both the Head and the body, the Christ’s passion is in Christ alone; but if by Christ you mean only the Head, then Christ’s passion is not in Christ alone. Hence if you are in the members of Christ, all you who hear me, and even you who hear me not (though you do hear, if you are united with the members of Christ), whatever you suffer at the hands of those who are no among the members of Christ, was lacking to the sufferings of Christ. It is added precisely because it was lacking. You fill up the measure; you do not cause it to overflow. You will suffer just so much as must be added of your sufferings to the complete passion of Christ, who suffered as our Head and who continues to suffer in His members, that is, in us. Into this common treasury each pays what he owes, and according to each one’s ability we all contribute our share of suffering. The full measure of the Passion will not be attained until the end of the world."

"Let every Christian, yea, let the whole body of Christ everywhere cry out, despite the tribulations it endures, despite temptations and countless scandals, saying: "Preserve my soul, for I am holy; save Thy servant, O my God, that trusteth in thee" (Ps. 85:2) No, this holy one is not proud, for he trusts in God."

"The members of Christ, many though they be, are bound to one another by the ties of charity and peace under the one Head, who is our Saviour Himself, and form one man. Often their voice is heard in the Psalms as the voice of one man; the cry of one is as the cry of all, for all are one in One."

""Thou dost honor me in vain," He cries from heaven, "thou dost honor Me in vain!" If someone wished to kiss thy cheek, but insisted at the same time on trampling thy feet; if with his hailed boots he were to crush thy feet as he tries to hold thy head and kiss thee, wouldst thou not interrupt his expression of respect and cry out: "What are thou doing, man? Thou art trampling upon me!" … It is for this reason that before He ascended into heaven our Lord Jesus Christ recommended to us His body, by which He was to remain upon earth. For He foresaw that many would pay Him homage because of His glory in heaven, but that their homage would be vain, so long as they despise His members on earth."

"The Avatar is always one and the same, because God is always One and the Same, the Eternal, Indivisible, Infinite One, who manifests Himself in the form of man as the Avatar, as the Messiah, as the Prophet, as the Ancient One — the Highest of the High. This Eternally One and the Same Avatar repeats His manifestation from time to time, in different cycles, adopting different human forms and different names, in different places, to reveal Truth in different garbs and different languages, in order to raise humanity from the pit of ignorance and help free it from the bondage of delusions."

"Whether there have been 26 Avatars since Adam, or 124,000 Prophets, as is sometimes claimed, or whether Jesus Christ was the last and only Messiah, or Muhammad the last Prophet, is all immaterial and insignificant when eternity and reality are under consideration."

"A clear distinction should be made between the Christ Principle... which is a high spiritual aspect to which each member of humanity must attain, and the same term applied to a personage of exalted rank representing that Principle, whether in the historical reference to the Man of Nazareth or otherwise. p. 9"

"Many years of work as an evangelist and as a teacher in the field of Christian principles, and a difficult cycle in which I faced the problem of my own relation to Christ and to Christianity, have brought me to two definitely clear and clean-cut recognitions: first, a recognition of the reality of the Individuality of Christ and of His Mission; and secondly, a recognition that the development of the Christ Consciousness and the Christ Nature in individual man, and in the race as a whole, carries with it the solution of our world problem. (Forward)"

"He has been for two thousand years the supreme Head of the Church Invisible, the Spiritual Hierarchy, composed of the disciples of all faiths. He recognises and loves those who are not Christian but who retain their allegiance to their Founders – the Buddha, Mohammed and others. He cares not what the faith is, if the objective is love of God and of humanity. If men look for the Christ Who left His disciples centuries ago, they will fail to recognise the Christ Who is in the process of returning. The Christ has no religious barriers in His consciousness. It matters not to Him of what faith a man may call himself. The Son of God is on His way, and He cometh not alone. His advance guard is already here, and the Plan which they must follow, is already made clear. Let recognition be the aim."

"He is the World Teacher and not a Christian teacher. He Himself told us that He had other folds, and to them He has meant as much as He has meant to the orthodox Christian. They may not call Him Christ, but they have their own name for Him and follow Him as truly and faithfully as their Western brethren."

"In the future, the eyes of humanity will be fixed upon the Christ, and not upon any such man-made institutions as the Church and its dignitaries; Christ will be seen as He is in reality, working through His disciples, through the Masters of the Wisdom, and through His followers who toil unseen (and usually unrecognised) behind world affairs. The sphere of His activity will be known to be the human heart and also the crowded market places of the world, but not some stone edifice, and not the pomp and ceremony of any ecclesiastical headquarters."

"A myth is capable of becoming a fact in the experience of an individual, for a myth is a fact which can be proven. Upon the myths we take our stand, but we must seek to re-interpret them in the light of the present. Through self-initiated experiment we can prove their validity; through experience we can establish them as governing forces in our lives; and through their expression we can demonstrate their truth to others. This is the theme of this book, dealing as it does with the facts of the Gospel story, that fivefold sequential myth which teaches us the revelation of divinity in the Person of Jesus Christ, and which remains eternally truth, in the cosmic sense, in the historical sense, and in its practical application to the individual. This myth divides itself into five great episodes: 1. The Birth at Bethlehem. 2. The Baptism in Jordan. 3. The Transfiguration on Mount Carmel. 4. The Crucifixion on Mount Golgotha. 5. The Resurrection and Ascension. (Chapter One)"

"This heavenly event takes place annually at the time of the full moon of Taurus (often called the "May Full Moon"), and at that event there is released upon Earth (according to the measure of man's demand) the blessing of God Himself, transmitted through the Buddha and His Brother, the Christ ... Thus, so the legend runs, the Buddha returns once a year to bless the world, transmitting through the Christ renewed spiritual life."

"Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place."

"And so, looking over the world at the moment, there seems little likelihood that when He comes He will be welcome. A few will recognise Him as they ever have done, and maybe, as the characteristics of the coming race are those of spirituality, there will be more to welcome Him, for the spiritual life is spreading to-day, and those who are of the Spirit will know the law of the Spirit; and I would fain leave you with the thought tonight that that is a truth, that the Supreme Teacher will again ere very long be incarnate upon earth, again made manifest as Teacher, again walking and living amongst us as last He walked in Palestine. Splendid as is the hope, mighty as is the inspiration, there is nothing too glorious to be possible for the ever-unfolding Spirit in man, and the hope of to-day is that that spirit is spreading, despite the characteristics of our time; that men are becoming more liberal, more tolerant, more ready to recognise that which is true and just."

"It may well be that we have reached such a time...that the popular mind of the day will be transcended by large numbers of the more spiritually minded, and that when He comes again He will be able to stay amongst us more than the three brief years that marked His last ministry. That, then, is the word, the thought I leave with you: to develop in yourselves the Spirit of the Christ, and then at His coming you shall recognise His beauty. Learn compassion, learn tenderness, learn good thoughts of others rather than evil, learn to be tender with the weak, learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again be a cross."

"To that manifested Presence the name of "the Christ" may rightly be given, and it was He who lived and moved in the form of the man Jesus over the hills and plains of Palestine, teaching, healing diseases, and gathering round Him as disciples a few of the more advanced souls. The rare charm of His royal love, outpouring from Him as rays from a sun, drew round Him the suffering, the weary, and the oppressed, and the subtly tender magic of His gentle wisdom purified, ennobled, and sweetened the lives that came into contact with His own... By parable and luminous imagery He taught the uninstructed crowds who pressed around Him, and, using the powers of the free Spirit, He healed many a disease by word or touch, reinforcing the magnetic energies belonging to His pure body with the compelling force of His inner life... The teachers and rulers of His nation soon came to eye Him with jealousy and anger; His spirituality was a constant reproach to their materialism, His power a constant, though silent, exposure of their weakness. p. 136"

"The historical Christ, then, is a glorious Being belonging to the great spiritual hierarchy that guides the spiritual evolution of humanity, who used for some three years the human body of the disciple Jesus; who spent the last of these three years in public teaching... who was a healer of diseases and performed other remarkable occult works; who gathered round Him a small band of disciples whom He instructed in the deeper truths of the spiritual life; who drew men to Him by the singular love and tenderness and the rich wisdom that breathed from His Person; and who was finally put to death for blasphemy, for teaching the inherent Divinity of Himself and of all men. p.141"

"But it must not be supposed that the work of the Christ for His followers was over after He had established the Mysteries, or was confined to rare appearances therein. That Mighty One who had used the body of Jesus as His vehicle, and whose guardian care extends over the whole spiritual evolution of the fifth race of humanity, gave into the strong hands of the holy disciple who had surrendered to Him his body the care of the infant Church. Perfecting his human evolution, Jesus became one of the Masters of Wisdom, and took Christianity under His special charge, ever seeking to guide it to the right lines, to protect, to guard and nourish it. He was the Hierophant in the Christian Mysteries, the direct Teacher of the Initiates. His the inspiration that kept alight the Gnosis in the Church, until the superincumbent mass of ignorance became so great that even His breath could not fan the flame sufficiently to prevent its extinguishment. p. 142"

"The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision’s greatest enemy. Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read’st black where I read white."

"I believe blindly in those words of Christ that I clearly understand and still more in those that were expressed by Him in the Sermon on the Mount for I find them literally repeated in the Buddhist sermons of Gautama, in the Dhammapada and in the Sastras of Siddhartha Buddha, as well as the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

"The religion which the primitive teaching of the early few apostles most resembled — a religion preached by Jesus himself — is the elder of... Buddhism. The latter as taught in its primitive purity, and carried to perfection by the last of the Buddhas, Gautama, based its moral ethics on three fundamental principles. It alleged that 1, every thing existing, exists from natural causes; 2, that virtue brings its own reward, and vice and sin their own punishment; and, 3, that the state of man in this world is probationary... However puzzling the subsequent theological tenets; however seemingly incomprehensible the metaphysical abstractions which have convulsed the theology of every one of the great religions of mankind as soon as it was placed on a sure footing, the above is found to be the essence of every religious philosophy, with the exception of later Christianity. It was that of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Jesus, and even of Moses, albeit the teachings of the Jewish law-giver have been so piously tampered with."

"In following Jesus, people are released from the hard yoke of their own laws to be under the gentle yoke of Jesus Christ. … Jesus' commandment never wishes to destroy life, but rather to preserve, strengthen, and heal life."

"The living truth is what I long to see : I cannot lean upon what used to be. So shut the Bible up and show me how The Christ you talk about Is living now."

"I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus."

"Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on. Even though (because it rejects a doctrine) it is now described as "doubt". This, I believe, is the kind of faith that Christ commended."

"He comes silently and unannounced; yet all--how strange--yea, all recognize Him, at once! The population rushes towards Him as if propelled by some irresistible force; it surrounds, throngs, and presses around, it follows Him.... Silently, and with a smile of boundless compassion upon His lips, He crosses the dense crowd, and moves softly on. The Sun of Love burns in His heart, and warm rays of Light, Wisdom and Power beam forth from His eyes, and pour down their waves upon the swarming multitudes of the rabble assembled around, making their hearts vibrate with returning love."

"He pauses at the portal of the old cathedral, just as a wee white coffin is carried in, with tears and great lamentations. The lid is off, and in the coffin lies the body of a fair-child, seven years old... 'He will raise the child to life!' confidently shouts the crowd to the weeping mother. The officiating priest... looks perplexed, and frowns... The procession halts, and the little coffin is gently lowered at his feet. Divine compassion beams forth from His eyes, and as He looks at the child, His lips are heard to whisper once more, 'Talitha Cumi'--and 'straightway the damsel arose.' The child rises in her coffin...and, looking round with large astonished eyes she smiles sweetly..."

"A terrible commotion rages among them, the populace shouts and loudly weeps, when suddenly, before the cathedral door, appears the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself... He pauses before the crowd and observes. He has seen all. He has witnessed the placing of the little coffin at His feet, the calling back to life. And now, his dark, grim face has grown still darker; his bushy grey eyebrows nearly meet, and his sunken eye flashes with sinister light. Slowly raising his finger, he commands his minions to arrest Him..."

"The Grand Inquisitor... addresses Him in these words: "'It is Thou! ... Thou!' ... Receiving no reply, he rapidly continues: 'Nay, answer not; be silent! ... And what couldst Thou say? ... I know but too well Thy answer.... Besides, Thou hast no right to add one syllable to that which was already uttered by Thee before.... Why shouldst Thou now return, to impede us in our work?... But art Thou as well aware of what awaits Thee in the morning?...to-morrow I will condemn and burn Thee on the stake, as the most wicked of all the heretics..."

"...his words mean, in short: 'Everything was given over by Thee to the Pope, and everything now rests with him alone; Thou hast no business to return and thus hinder us in our work.' In this sense the Jesuits not only talk but write likewise."

"He [the Grand Inquisitor] seriously regards it as a great service done by himself, his brother monks and Jesuits, to humanity, to have conquered and subjected unto their authority that freedom, and boasts that it was done but for the good of the world... Man is born a rebel, and can rebels be ever happy?..."

"Having disburdened his heart, the Inquisitor waits for some time to hear his prisoner speak in His turn... The old man longs to hear His voice, to hear Him reply; better words of bitterness and scorn than His silence. Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor, He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score and-ten-year-old lips. That is all the answer."

"If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity. It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can."

"The Christian sees the Church as the Body of Christ, as the vessel that guards with absolute integrity the deposit of faith, as the faithful Spouse who communicates without addition or subtraction all that Christ entrusted."

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! "Father, the atheists?" Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace."

"I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being."

"The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world."

"Take heed lest any man deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet."

"And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or, lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect."

"Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? And they answered, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. And he charged them that they should tell no man of him."

"And as soon as it was day, the elders of the people and the chief priests and the scribes came together, and led him into their council, saying, Art thou the Christ? tell us. And he said unto them, If I tell you, ye will not believe : And if I also ask you, ye will not answer me, nor let me go. Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the power of God. Then said they all, Art thou then the Son of God? And he said unto them, Ye say that I am. And they said, What need we any further witness? for we ourselves have heard of his own mouth."

"The problems confronting us should be faced with courage, with truth and understanding; as well as with the willingness to speak factually, with simplicity and with love in the effort to expose the truth and clarify the problems which must be solved. The opposing forces of entrenched evil must be routed before He for Whom all men wait, the Christ, can come."

"The knowledge that He is ready and anxious publicly to appear to His loved Humanity only adds to the sense of general frustration, and another very vital question arises: For what period of time must we endure, struggle and fight? The reply comes with clarity: He will come unfailingly when a measure of peace has been restored, when the principle of sharing is at least in process of controlling economic affairs, and when churches and political groups have begun to clean house. Then He can and will come; then the Kingdom of God will be publicly recognized and will no longer be a thing of dreams and of wishful thinking and orthodox hope."

"He (the Risen Christ) will not this time demonstrate the perfected life of a Son of God, which was His main mission before; He will appear as the supreme Head of the Spiritual Hierarchy, meeting the need of the thirsty nations of the world – thirsty for truth, for right human relations, and for loving understanding. He will be recognised this time by all, and in His Own Person testify to the fact of the resurrection, and hence demonstrate the paralleling fact of the immortality of the soul, of the spiritual man. The emphasis during the past two thousand years has been on death; it has coloured all the teaching of the orthodox churches; only one day in the year has been dedicated to the thought of the resurrection. (9 – 151)."

"When He comes Whom angels and men await, and Whose work it is to inaugurate the New Age and so complete the work He began in Palestine two thousand years ago, He will bring with Him some of the great Angels, as well as certain of the Masters."

"It can be expected that the orthodox Christian will at first reject the theories about the Christ which occultism presents; at the same time, this same orthodox Christian will find it increasingly difficult to induce the intelligent masses of people to accept the impossible Deity and the feeble Christ, which historical Christianity has endorsed. A Christ Who is present and living, Who is known to those who follow Him, Who is a strong and able executive, and not a sweet and sentimental sufferer, Who has never left us but Who has worked for two thousand years through the medium of His disciples, the inspired men and women of all faiths, all religions, and all religious persuasions; Who has no use for fanaticism or hysterical devotion, but Who loves all men persistently, intelligently and optimistically, Who sees divinity in them all, and Who comprehends the techniques of the evolutionary development of the human consciousness (mental, emotional and physical, producing civilisations and cultures appropriate to a particular point in evolution) – these ideas the intelligent public can and will accept."

"For God has other Words for other worlds, But for this world the Word of God is Christ."

"In those far-off times it was the Lord Gautama who ruled the world of religion and education; but now He has yielded that high office to the Lord Maitreya, whom western people call the Christ—who took the body of the disciple Jesus during the last three years of its life on the physical plane; and those who know tell us that it will not be long before He descends among us once again, to found another faith. Anyone whose mind is broad enough to grasp this magnificent conception of the splendid reality of things will see instantly how worse than futile it is to set up in one’s mind one religion as in opposition to another, to try to convert any person from one to another, or to compare depreciatingly the founder of one with the founder of another.... p. 10"

"You ask about the Great One whom we call the Christ, the Lord Maitreya, and about His work in the past and in the future... there is what we may call a department of the inner government of the world which is devoted to religious instruction—the founding and inspiring of religions, and so on. It is the Christ who is in charge of that department; sometimes He Himself appears on earth to found a great religion and sometimes He entrusts such work to one of His more advanced assistants. We must regard Him as exercising a kind of steady pressure from behind all the time, so that the power employed will flow as though automatically into every channel anywhere and of any sort which is open to its passage; so that He is working simultaneously through every religion, and utilizing all that is good in the way of devotion and self-sacrifice in each. The fact that these religions may be wasting their strength in abusing one another upon the physical plane is of course lamentable, but it does not make much difference to the fact that whatever is good in each of them is being simultaneously utilized from behind by the same great Power. p. 19"

"The true founder of anarchy was Jesus Christ and … the first anarchist society was that of the apostles."

"Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ are not one and the same person. This is one of the most difficult claims for many Christians to accept in connection with Maitreya, the World Teacher, and it therefore needs some further explanation. In fact, the title Christ does not refer to an individual at all. It is the name of a function in the Hierarchy of Masters of Wisdom, that group of advanced beings who guide the evolution of humanity from behind the scenes. Whoever stands at the head of this Hierarchy automatically becomes the World Teacher, known in the East as the Bodhisattva, during the term of his office. Maitreya, who embodies the energy we call the Christ Principle, has held that office for over two millennia, and in Palestine he manifested himself as the Christ to inaugurate the Age of Pisces, then beginning. The method he used is called spiritual overshadowing, that is, his consciousness informed and guided the actions and teachings of his disciple Jesus. It was, therefore, the consciousness of the Christ, Maitreya, which was seen and experienced by those around Jesus."

"Beseech Christ. Search for the joy of turning to the Creator. Learn, and unlock the Gates of Knowledge, And affirm yourselves in understanding the Divine Plan."

"I am not a bridge built of promises, but verily the Light that calls to you. I teach love. My disciples must realize happiness in the love of Christ."

"Beware of venomous vibrations. Strive for the future and succumb not to the spell of the present. Follow the simplest path as you ascend the mountain. Powerful, exalted visions require pure surroundings, and prana. Christ’s deeds were consummated amidst the beauties of nature. Never did He dwell for long in cities."

"The Spirit of Christ breathes across the desert of life. Like a spring It wears Its way through the solid rocks. In the milky firmament It radiates in lights beyond counting, and rises upward in the stem of every flower."

"With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified.[…] But in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear."

"When men began to visualize Christ as an inaccessible idol, there began a period of visions of Christ in most realistic forms. He appeared as very close to men, entering into their daily life. Briefly speaking, every popular error is corrected. In the day of woman’s humiliation one may trace the appearance of the Divine Mother... After St. Augustine the church began its plunge into the darkness of the Middle Ages, and Christ was locked behind a barrier of gold. In order to break it, Christ Himself descended even in lesser Images in order to manifest again the grandeur of communion in unity. The wisdom of antiquity understood well the waves of the needs of the world."

"Great crimes have been committed in the name of Christ... All the embellishments need to be discarded. We are not just talking about works that one might expect to be embellished; even the works of Origen were subjected to alteration. Therefore, it is time to change conditions in the world."

"One may build a city, one may give the best knowledge, but most difficult of all is to reveal the true Image of Christ. Think, how to cleanse the Image of Christ. Gathering the crumbs of the people’s concept of the Savior and replacing the chiton by overalls, one can find illumination. By human hands must the Temple be built."

"... Christ spoke those memorable words... He was looking on as the moonlight poured onto the sands. “We have lost the way,” I told Him. “We have to wait and find out the positions of the stars.” “Rasul Morya, why should We bother about the way, when the entire world is waiting for Us?” Then, taking His bamboo staff He traced a square around His footprint and said, “Truly, by human feet.” And having made an impression with His palm, He enclosed it in a square. “Truly, by human hands.” Between the squares He drew what looked like a pillar crowned with an arc. He said: “Oh, how Aum will penetrate the human consciousness! Here I have drawn a pistil with an arc above it, and have laid the foundation in four directions. When the Temple is built by human feet and human hands — the Temple where the pistil placed by Me will blossom — then may the builders walk My path. Why wait for a path, when the path is before Us?... When the Name of the Temple is uttered, this image shall appear. As a reminder of My constellation, a square and nine stars shall shine above the Temple. The sign of the foot and the hand shall be inscribed on the cornerstone.” That is what He Himself said on the eve of the new moon. The heat of the desert was great. (153)"

"The Star of the Morning is a sign of the Great Epoch, the first ray of which will flash forth from the Teaching of Christ; for who is to glorify the Mother of the World if not Christ, He who was belittled by the world? Give Us the arch of the Vault through which to enter! (153)"

"Cryptogram about Christ: Night fell. Christ was seated at a threshold. A scribe approached and asked: “Why dost thou sit in the passageway?” Christ answered: “Because I am the threshold of the Spirit. If thou wouldst pass, pass through Me.” Another scribe asked: “Can it be that the Son of David sits at the place for dogs?” Christ answered: “Verily, thou defamest David, My Father.” It became dark, and a third scribe asked: “Why sitteth thou as if fearful of thy house?” Christ answered: “I await the night’s darkness, to free Me from sight of thee. Verily, let darkness depart into darkness.” Then, rising and pointing to Mount Moriah, whereon stood the Temple, He said: “My Grandfather created the Temple of stone, but He sits under the linen of the tent.” Said the scribe: “Madman, he believes that Solomon still lives.” And they departed in ignorance. Afterwards Mary came out of the house and, seeing Christ, said: “Teacher, share our evening meal.” Christ answered: “The gift of the heart glows in the darkness.”"

"People will ask: “Who is greater, Christ or Buddha?” Answer: “It is impossible to measure the far-off worlds. We can only be enraptured by their radiance.” The Ray of Christ feeds the Earth as much as the Rainbow of Buddha bears the affirmation of the law of life."

"Christ founded no church, established no state, gave practically no laws, organized no government and set up no external authority, but he did seek to write on the hearts of men God's law and make them self-legislating."

"Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me."

"Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid. For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor. For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain."

"Although the law of Reincarnation was a cornerstone of every ancient religion of the East, and of course the religion of the Jews was no exception, already in the days of Jesus this law was badly distorted by the priesthood and maintained its purity only among individual sects. In the New Testament we have plenty of proof regarding this knowledge of the Jews; Christ Himself confirms it. For instance, in the Gospel of St. Matthew (17:10-13), "And his disciples asked him, saying, why then say the scribes that Elias must come first? And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist."...St. John (9:1-3): "As Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." Indeed, how could a person blind from birth be responsible for his sins without the law of Reincarnation! There are other very clear hints, but you should find them for yourself."

"The Image of the true Christ—the Teacher—abides in our hearts and minds, and we completely join Vivekananda in his words about Christ. However, we see Man-God in Christ, and not a narrow sectarian who condemns everybody to the ranks of "anti-Christ" if they do not accept the ecclesiastic limitations and distortions of his Teaching. We have plenty of adherents even among the official representatives of the various churches. It is impossible to stop all progress, and it is impossible to share the mentality of the ancient priesthood, the creators of Christian dogmas, who, at their synods for instance, discussed very seriously how many spirits could be placed on the end of a needle, or whether or not woman possessed a soul, and similar gems of profound spiritual revelation... Let us not forget that the law of Reincarnation was rejected by these wise men only in the sixth century, at the Council of Constantinople. No, it is time to look through all the Teachings, discard the later distorted accumulations, and return to the pure original sources. It would be advisable for the fathers of the church to recollect the Covenant of Christ, and of his favorite disciple, "love one another." Then everything would take its right place."

"Just think how many clear indications about reincarnation, about the law of Karma, are given in the New Testament, precisely in the words of Christ Himself! But our "spiritual fathers" thoroughly avoid these questions! May God be their judge! Today, we experience a dreadful spiritual crisis, a terrible, all-corrupting atheism, which results from narrow, lifeless sectarianism and from choking dogmatism, as well as from the fall of morality among the representatives of churches. We have never spoken, nor will we speak against any religion or church, as it is better to have some religion or church than none at all. But we will always protest against lack of tolerance, morality and knowledge. Priests are necessary, but they should be real spiritual leaders and should be progressive and not continue to exist in the chains of the dark ignorance of the Middle Ages. The spirit of the Inquisition is still very strong. Do you think that if Christ came again on earth now He could avoid crucifixion? At best, would He escape lynching, or imprisonment for life, with the title of Antichrist?"

"You ask whether it is possible to understand the indication regarding the appearance of Christ in lesser images and in reality. Certainly. Medievalism made an inaccessible idol of Christ and deprived him of any humanity, therefore also of divinity. Thus, all the Teachings of the East proclaim that there is no god (or gods) who was not at one time a man. Such a forced separation of Christ from human essence threatened and still threatens a complete break in the communion of humanity with the Higher World. One can trace how in the Middle Ages there appeared every now and then great saints who tried to re-establish this almost lost communion, and all of them insisted precisely on the human essence of Christ. Especially strong affirmations of this can be found in the pages of the autobiography of St. Theresa, the Spanish saint of the sixteenth century, and still earlier, in the visions and writings of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Gertrude. Thus, the form and the quality of the visions and communications received through such communion always correspond with the level of the consciousness of those who see and receive them, and also with the needs of the time. As it was said, "In is precisely by following the character of the visions that the best history of the intellect may be written.""

"I strongly recommend that all read the autobiography of St. Theresa. In spite of the fact that this work went through the "spiritual" censorship of the Church, some amazing pages have been preserved. By propagating the dogma of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God, the Church contradicts the very sense of the prayer given to us by Jesus Christ himself, "Our Father which art in heaven." And also the words of the Scriptures, "So God created man in his own image." (Genesis 1:27) Thus, by claiming the exclusiveness of sonship and divine origin for Jesus Christ, the Church, by that very claim, forever divorced him from mankind. From this came a whole train of grave events; the exclusion of Jesus Christ from the life of humanity, the obliteration of his human Sacrifice and the awful suggestion implying that the death of Christ on the Cross saved humanity from "original" sin (?!) and from all subsequent sins."

"If the great examples and sacrifice of Christ kindles the fires within our hearts, and if we apply his Covenant, it can be said that he did not suffer in vain, and that precisely the Cup that he accepted, sealed his Covenant. But if we imagine that, regardless of what we do and what crimes we commit, the blood that was shed by Christ will save us forever from the power of the devil, then we ourselves become these very devils! No one can save another. Only by personal efforts can the spirit ascend into the preordained beautiful worlds. "Faith without works is dead." All the Great Teachers are called Saviors of the World, because again and again they point out to us the Path of Light. However, They are able to help and safeguard us only so far as we ourselves accept Their protection. The whole of Cosmos is based on the law of reciprocity or mutuality, and where there is no response, there is no result. This explains why Christ could not perform miracles where there was no faith in him, and where there was no striving of the spirit toward his healing ray."

"Christ came, and only fishermen accepted him. But when the centuries laid upon Him all the weight of the church dogma and golden vestments, making out of Him an inaccessible idol, multitudes believed in Him."

"Besides, why should the apostles be regarded as infallible? It is not only in the Gospel that they are revealed to be far from the high moral level that is to be expected of the closest disciples of Christ, but reading their own writings, one sadly realizes how many discords and all sorts of sinful abominations went on in those first Christian communities out of which came the Fathers of the Church. And even among the apostles themselves there was plenty of disunity. Let us, for instance, recall the perpetual contention between Peter and Paul, which has survived as a symbol of all dissension among so-called Christian zealots, who have split the one Teaching of Christ into sects and churches warring among themselves. I advise you to read Merezhkovski's book Paul and Augustine. You will find interesting material in it. As usual, this writer offers a complete treasury of most valuable information."

"Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law."

"At sea on a ship in a thunderstorm on the very night the Christ was born a sailor heard from overhead a mighty voice cry "Pan is Dead!" So follow Christ as best you can Pan is dead — Long live Pan!"

"I'm gonna look twice at you until I see the Christ in you when I'm lookin through the eyes of love."

"Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?"

"At its beginnings there was very powerful meditation on the presence of Christ in the oppressed Indians, which objectively pointed toward a christology of the "body of Christ." Guamán Poma, for example, said, "By faith we know clearly that where there is a poor person there is Jesus Christ himself," and Bartolomé de las Casas declared, "In the Indies I leave Jesus Christ, our God, being whipped and afflicted, and buffeted and crucified, not once but thousands of times, as often as the Spaniards assault and destroy those people." But this original christological insight did not thrive, and what became the tradition was a christology based on the dogmatic formulas, in which&mdash;however well they were known and understood&mdash;what was stressed was the divinity of Christ rather than his real and lived humanity."

"The sublime title "Christ" is an adjective which only receives its specific value from the specificity of the noun, Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus is forgotten, then it becomes possible to fill the adjective with whatever suits at the time, without checking whether Jesus was like that or not, or whether this means leaving the world sunk in its wretchedness or not; or worse still, without asking if this image legitimates the tragedy of the world or brings liberation from it."

"Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ’s body."

"Always think of yourself as everyone's servant; look for Christ Our Lord in everyone and you will then have respect and reverence for them all."

"I had some trepidation about the Christ parallels, but I hoped there would be little outcry if I handled it tastefully, since I was not really making any serious statement on religion... at least not overtly."

"Don't get attached to any one word. You can substitute "Christ" for presence, if that is more meaningful to you. Christ is your God essence or the Self, as it is sometimes called in the East. The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence. Many misunderstandings and false beliefs about Christ will clear if you realize that there is no past or future in Christ. To say that Christ was or will be is a contradiction in terms. Jesus was. He was a man who lived two thousand years ago and realized divine presence, his true nature. The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness... Ch. 5"

"Christ says, "Forgive all. Forgive not once, not seven times, but forgive without end." "Love your enemies." "Do good to those who hate you." Courts of law do not forgive, but they punish; they do not do good, but evil, to those whom they call the enemies of society. So, the true sense of the doctrine is that Christ forbids all courts of law."

"Christianity in its true sense puts an end to government. So it was understood at its very commencement; it was for that cause that Christ was crucified. So it has always been understood by people who were not under the necessity of justifying a Christian government. Only from the time that the heads of government assumed an external and nominal Christianity, men began to invent all the impossible, cunningly devised theories by means of which Christianity can be reconciled with government. But no honest and serious-minded man of our day can help seeing the incompatibility of true Christianity — the doctrine of meekness, forgiveness of injuries, and love — with government, with its pomp, acts of violence, executions, and wars. The profession of true Christianity not only excludes the possibility of recognizing government, but even destroys its very foundations."

"You have already heard that 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."

"The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"

"I say of Jesus, as all humanists do. "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?" But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake."

"Missionary zeal has not Christianized Africa, Asia and Oceania, but has brought these territories under the cold, cruel and destructive domination of the white race, which has trodden down everything. It would be strange, indeed, that the word of Christ should have produced such results if it had been properly understood."

"Except for one or two passages in St. John's Gospel it is difficult to get any words actually ascribed to Jesus in which be claimed to be the Jewish Messiah (rendered in Greek by "the Christ") and still more difficult is it to find any claim to be a part of the godhead, or any passage in which he explained the doctrine of the Atonement or urged any sacrifices or sacraments (that is to say, priestly offices) upon his followers."

"Christ had truths to present which the people were unprepared to accept or even to understand. For this reason also He taught them in parables. By connecting His teaching with the scenes of life, experience, or nature, He secured their attention and impressed their hearts. Afterward, as they looked upon the objects that illustrated His lessons, they recalled the words of the divine Teacher. To minds that were open to the Holy Spirit, the significance of the Saviour's teaching unfolded more and more. Mysteries grew clear, and that which had been hard to grasp became evident. Jesus sought an avenue to every heart. By using a variety of illustrations, He not only presented truth in its different phases, but appealed to the different hearers."

"Reward for information leading to the apprehension of — Jesus Christ Wanted — For Sedition, Criminal Anarchy — Vagrancy, and Conspiring to Overthrow the Established Government. Dresses poorly, said to be a carpenter by trade, ill-nourished, has visionary ideas, associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums. Alien — believed to be a Jew. Alias: "Prince of Peace. Son of Man." "Light of the world" &c. &c. Professional Agitator, Red beard, marks on hands and feet the result of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities."

"We always have hoped that American diplomacy deploys itself in dialogue and persuasion rather than by ultimatums. That is the path we want in international relations."

"Even if you persuade me, you won’t persuade me."

"Variant:You won't persuade [peiseis] me even if you convince [peisēs] me."

"In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech."

"This progress among the people through Dharma has been done by two means, by Dharma regulations and by persuasion. Of these, Dharma regulation is of little effect, while persuasion has much more effect. The Dharma regulations I have given are that various animals must be protected. And I have given many other Dharma regulations also. But it is by persuasion that progress among the people through Dharma has had a greater effect in respect of harmlessness to living beings and non-killing of living beings."

"Persuasion of others is to show that oneself is convinced."

"If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated."

"To yield readily--easily--to the persuasion of a friend is no merit.... To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.”"

"Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world."

"Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art."

"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor. I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

"Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world."

"What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views."

"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process."

"There is hardly an example of a mass movement achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by persuasion. ...It was the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and conversion went hand in hand... Where Christianity failed to gain or retain the backing of state power, it achieved neither a wide nor a permanent hold. ..."The most flourishing periods for Mohammedanism have been at the times of its greatest political ascendency..." The Reformation made headway only when it gained the backing of the ruling prince or the local government. In the case of the French Revolution, "It was the armies of the Revolution, not its ideas, that penetrated throughout the whole of Europe." ...The threat of communism at present does not come from the forcefulness of its preaching but from the fact that it is backed by one of the mightiest armies on earth."

"I used all diligence to arrive at London and therefore I now gave my crew a certificate under my hand, of my free and willing return, without persuasion or force by any one or more of them."

"Maybe tomorrow when He looks down Every green field and every town All of his children, every nation There'll be peace and good, brotherhood… Crystal blue persuasion."

"Behold, I am become a reproach to thy holy name, by serving any ambition and the sins of others; which though I did by the persuasion of other men, yet my own conscience did cheek and upbraid me in it."

"It is therefore worthwhile, to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things, whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent, and moderate our persuasions."

"The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion."

"It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar."

"American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that."

"A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion."

"I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life."

"The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society."

"Only by plunging into illusions to which every fact gives the lie can he persuade himself that his will is a force that can overcome all other forces, or that it is less conditioned by circumstances than a wheelbarrow is."

"I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion."

"Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion."

"They have the knack of persuading men before instructing them; although truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by first persuading."

"The problem with breaking up with someone, if you are a little unsure — and so often, people are unsure — is that breaking up involves persuasion. You have to persuade your ex that it is better this way for everyone. And this is difficult if you have not entirely persuaded yourself. It is especially tricky to do this if you are also naked, and making two cups of coffee.”"

"Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces."

"'Tis more than reason that goes to persuasion."

"For me, abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. I'll go further and say that abstraction is nearer my heart. I prefer to see with closed eyes."

"Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves."

"An abstraction is one thing that represents several real things equally well."

"A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one’s own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias."

"The reliance on the abstract is thus not a result of an over-estimation but rather of an insight into the limited powers of our reason. It is the over-estimation of the powers of reason which leads to the revolt against the submission to abstract rules. Constructivist rationalism rejects the demand for this discipline of reason because it deceives itself that reason can directly master all the particulars; and it is thereby led to a preference for the concrete over the abstract, the particular over the general, because its adherents do not realize how much they thereby limit the span of true control by reason. The hubris of reason manifests itself in those who believe that they can dispense with abstraction and achieve a full mastery of the concrete and thus positively master the social process."

"The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."

"Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too."

"Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations."

"Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole."

"I discovered the works of Euler and my perception of the nature of mathematics underwent a dramatic transformation. I was de-Bourbakized, stopped believing in sets, and was expelled from the Cantorian paradise. I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it. I learned that one has to adapt abstractions to reality and not the other way around. Mathematics stopped being a science of theories but reappeared to me as a science of numbers and shapes."

"Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake."

"That which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of Wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results."

"That &#91;philosophy&#93; is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. ... They were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. And this is confirmed by the facts; for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought."

"As the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue &#91;philosophy&#93; as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake."

"And therefore it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honour or fame, or inablement for business, that are the true ends of knowledge; some of these being more worthy than other, though all inferior and degenerate: but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them, which he had in his first state of creation."

"Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation."

"For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself, and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practicable enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation. For as in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business; so in the inquiring of causes and reasons it is much easier to find out such causes as will satisfy the mind of man and quiet objections, than such causes as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions."

"The learning that now is hath the curse of barrenness, and is courtesan-like, for pleasure and not for fruit."

"The true end, scope, or office of knowledge, which I have set down to consist not in any plausible, delectable, reverend, or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before, for the better endowment and help of man's life."

"Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule."

"Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with … Renan’s verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. … The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage."

"The hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted."

"The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do."

"Surely at least some of our logical principles … are far more evident and obvious to us than are any of the empirical generalizations we find in psychology, or in any other of the empirical sciences. Thus, to attempt to explain logic in terms of psychology is to explain the more certain by the less certain. It is, in short, to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius."

"There is an obscurum per obscurius problem as well. In order to know whether or not hiccups are taller than ants we must first know (a) whether or not there is a consensus that hiccups are taller than ants, and (b) if there is, whether or not the communication that produces that consensus was free, open, and undistorted. But isn’t it obvious that it is easier to determine whether or not hiccups are taller than ants than it is to determine either (a) or (b)? Or, to put it another way, wouldn’t any skeptical doubts about our ability to determine even something so obvious as that hiccups are taller than ants also be more than sufficient to wipe out any hope of being able to know about the outcome, and degree of openness, of any process of public communication?"

"Is it easier to know what our culture’s epistemic norms are in terms of which it is to be determined whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to know that giraffes are taller than ants? Is our knowledge concerning the identity of those norms to be construed on a realist model, or must we rather consult our culture’s epistemic norms in order to use them to figure out the identity of those norms? If the former, why is it that we can have objective knowledge concerning the identity of our culture’s epistemic norms when we can’t have it with regard to the relative height of giraffes and ants? And if the latter, how is an infinite regress to be avoided?"

"Is it because Westerners have come to lose their intellectuality through over-developing their capacity for action that they console themselves by inventing theories which set action above everything, and even go so far, as in the case of pragmatism, as to deny that there exists anything of value beyond action; or is the contrary true, that it is the acceptance of this point of view that has led to the intellectual atrophy we see today?"

"Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?"

"The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding."

"If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Pierce, who has told us that he ‘learned philosophy out of Kant,’ one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful."

"The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas’ or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody.’"

"All things in nature become identical with the phenomena they present when submitted to the practices of our laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and interests of society as it is. This view may be compared with that of a criminologist maintaining that trustworthy knowledge of a human being can be obtained only by the well-tested and streamlined examining methods applied to a suspect in the hands of the metropolitan police."

"Pragmatism, in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt."

"Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value."

"In the face of the idea that truth might afford the opposite of satisfaction and turn out to be completely shocking to humanity at any given historical moment, … the fathers of pragmatism made the satisfaction of the subject the criterion of truth. For such a doctrine there is no possibility of rejecting or even criticizing any species of belief that is enjoyed by its adherents."

"Pragmatism … reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of ‘being practical’ as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived."

"Plato and his objectivistic successors … preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny—the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course."

"Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

"The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another."

"The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity."

"Pragmatism... asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?”"

"No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts."

"Too much faith is the worst ally... When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good."

"The science, which teaches arts and handicrafts Is merely science for the gaining of a living; But the science which teaches deliverance from worldly existence, Is not that the true science?"

"Psychology, speaking for emotion and instinct, has reduced intellect to impotence over life. Metaphysics has subordinated it to will. Bergson and his followers have charged it with falsehood and issued a general warning against its misrepresentations; while with pragmatists and instrumentalists it has sunk so low that it is dressed in livery and sent to live in the servant's quarters. It is against this last indignity in particular that I wish to speak a word of protest, to the end that the intellect may be accorded full rights within the community of human activities and interests."

"A certain maxim of Logic which I have called Pragmatism has recommended itself to me for diverse reasons and on sundry considerations. Having taken it as my guide for most of my thought, I find that as the years of my knowledge of it lengthen, my sense of the importance of it presses upon me more and more. If it is only true, it is certainly a wonderfully efficient instrument. It is not to philosophy only that it is applicable. I have found it of signal service in every branch of science that I have studied. My want of skill in practical affairs does not prevent me from perceiving the advantage of being well imbued with pragmatism in the conduct of life."

"The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses."

"We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading sophistry. Pragmatism, in its modern systematized form, would scarcely have been possible in earlier times. It has, however, become so since erudite scholars and original thinkers have deemed it fit to cater to a public incapable of taking a genuine interest in their researches and their speculations, a public which in the last resort wishes simply to amuse itself with these as it amuses itself with everything else, — the public of our modern democracies. We feel flattered by the plaudits of the crowd, and to procure these we are satisfied to get down to the level of those whom as thinkers we should disdain. Popular science, popular art, popular theology — only one thing was lacking — popular philosophy."

"Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be."

"When one appeals solely to the truth of a discourse to authorize it intellectually and socially, one represses reflection on its practical-moral meaning and its social consequences. A discourse that justifies itself solely by epistemic appeals will not be compelled to defend its conceptual decisions on moral and political grounds."

"On the other hand, ... a pragmatic turn ... expands the number of parties who may participate more or less as equals in a debate about society."

"Where a discourse is redeemed ultimately by metatheoretical appeals, experts step forward as the authorities. This situation contributes to the enfeeblement of a vital public realm of moral and political debate because social questions are deemed the domain of experts. By contrast, when a discourse is judged by its practical consequences or its moral implications, more citizens are qualified to assess it by considering its social and moral implications. A pragmatic move, in principle, implies an active, politically engaged citizenry participating in a democratic public realm."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not."

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do"

"Le plus grand ennemi du bon, c'est le mieux."

"We civilised men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands... Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

"Aristocracies do not last… Where, in France, are the descendants of the Frankish conquerors? The genealogies of the English nobility have been very exactly kept; and they show that very few families still remain to claim descent from the comrades of William the Conqueror. The rest have vanished... They decay not in numbers only. They decay also in quality, in the sense that they lose their vigor…The governing class is restored not only in numbers, but—and that is the more important thing—in quality, by families rising from the lower classes… If human aristocracies were like thorough-breds among animals, which reproduce themselves over long periods of time with approximately the same traits, the history of the human race would be something altogether different from the history we know."

"Since each individual produced by the sexual process contains an unique set of genes, very exceptional combinations of genes are unlikely to appear twice even within the same family. So if genius is to any extent hereditary, it winks on and off through the gene pool in a way that would be difficult to measure or predict. Like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up to the top of the hill only to have it tumble down again, the human gene pool creates hereditary genius in many ways in many places only to have it come apart in the next generation... For this reason alone, we are justified in considering the preservation of the entire gene pool as a contingent primary value until such time as an almost unimaginably greater knowledge of human heredity provides us with the option of a democratically contrived eugenics."

"Nobody wants to be caught agreeing with that monster, even in a single particular. The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from "ought" to "is" and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?"

"We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason – to separate the sound from the worthless."

"In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play and the fittest did not survive... It is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes."

"One of the effects of civilisation is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands."

"There is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilisation."

"To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies. Institutions which 'foster good-for-nothings' commit an unquestionable injury because they put a stop to that natural process of elimination by which society continually purifies itself."

"I believe in striving to raise the human race to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of effective endeavor.""I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ plasm being good) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring." "I believe that, having made our choice in marriage carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children in order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped by that less carefully selected." "I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits." "I believe in repressing my instincts when to follow them would injure the next generation."

"This is the law of Mendel,And often he maken it plain, Defectives will breed defectives, And the insane breed insane.Oh why do we allow these peopleTo breed back to the monkey's nest,To increase our country's burdensWhen we should only breed the best?"

"If a man has no sons, he has no full right to speak about the needs of a single matter of state. He has to have risked with the others what is most precious to him; only then is he bound firmly to the state. One must consider the happiness of one's descendants, and so, above all, have descendants, in order to take a proper, natural part in all institutions and their transformation. The development of higher morality depends on a man's having sons: this makes him unselfish, or, more exactly, it expands his selfishness over time, and allows him seriously to pursue goals beyond his individual lifetime."

"One can justly be proud of an unbroken line of good ancestors, up to one's father-but not proud of the line, for everyone has that. The descent from good ancestors makes up true nobility of birth; one single interruption in that chain, one evil ancestor, and the nobility of birth is cancelled out. Everyone who speaks of his nobility should be asked whether he has no violent, greedy, dissolute, malicious, or cruel man among his ancestors. If he can thereupon answer "no" in good conscience, one should court his friendship."

"We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture."

"The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so."

"Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection."

"Die dummen Moralisten haben immer die Veredelung angestrebt ohne zugleich die Basis zu wollen: die leibliche Veradlichung [...][,] sie haben an’s Individuum gedacht und nicht an die Fortdauer des Edlen durch Zeugung. Kurzsichtig!"

"The keystone of the new social structure, the pivotal factor of advancing civilization, the guide of the new religion, is biology; for man is an animal, and his characteristics, his requirements, and his reactions can be recorded and studied quite as carefully and precisely as those of any other animal."

"60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too."

"The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves… If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate."

"Passing from quantity to quality of population, we come to the question of eugenics. We may perhaps assume that, if people grow less superstitious, government will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not considered desirable as parents. This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased. But probably the effect upon really exceptional intelligence will be bad. Mr. Micawber, who was Dickens's father, would hardly have been regarded as a desirable parent. How many imbeciles ought to outweigh one Dickens I do not profess to know.Eugenics has, of course, more ambitious possibilities in a more distant future. It may aim not only at eliminating undesired types, but at increasing desired types. Moral standards may alter so as to make it possible for one man to be the sire of a vast progeny by many different mothers. When men of science envisage a possibility of this kind, they are prone to a type of fallacy which is common also in other directions. They imagine that a reform inaugurated by men of science would be administered as men of science would wish, by men similar in outlook to those who have advocated it. In like manner women who advocated votes for women used to imagine that the woman voter of the future would resemble the ardent feminist who won her the vote; and socialist leaders imagine that a socialist State would be administered by idealistic reformers like themselves. These are, of course, delusions; a reform, once achieved, is handed over to the average citizen. So, if eugenics reached the point where it could increase desired types, it would not be the types desired by present-day eugenists that would be increased, but rather the type desired by the average official. Prime Ministers, Bishops, and others whom the State considers desirable might become the fathers of half the next generation. Whether this would be an improvement it is not for me to say, as I have no hope of ever becoming either a Bishop or a Prime Minister."

"The eugenics movement resists cramming into a single, unambiguous political box. ...When the Supreme Court, in the greatest victory [,] of the American eugenics movement, upheld compulsory sterilization of the mentally unfit in 1927, all liberal justices voted aye; the single dissent in this eight-to-one ruling was filed by Pierce Butler,] the court's most conservative member, a catholic who upheld his church's position on reproductive controls."

"All practices aimed at eugenics, any use of the human body or any of its parts for financial gain, and human cloning shall be prohibited."

"Eugenics is dead."

"If you don't include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society... So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That's a problem."

"Birth control and abortion are turning out to be great eugenic advances of our time. If they had been advanced for eugenic reasons, it would have retarded or stopped their acceptance."

"[T]here is a fundamental difference between a regulatory system where eugenics [under whatever name] is practised for the well-being of the individual - whether human or non-human - and an authoritarian society where eugenics is practised for the notional benefit of a class, race or nation."

"While modern social conditions are removing the crude physical checks which the unrestrained struggle for existence places on the over-fertility of the unfit, they may at the same time be leading to a lessened relative fertility in those physically and mentally fitter stocks, from which the bulk of our leaders have hitherto been drawn."

"The only remedy, if one be possible at all, is to alter the relative fertility of the good and the bad stocks in the community."

"[T]he campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics."

"But I see a third motive which unconsciously plays an important part; it is the idea of sacrifice. A lunatic may cause the mental and economic decay of a family and also ruin it morally. If healthy human beings make great sacrifices for the community and lay down their lives by order of the state, the insane person, if he could arouse himself mentally and make a decision, would choose a similar sacrifice for himself. Why should not the state be allowed to enact this sacrifice in his case and impose on him what he would want to do himself?""

"It appears after analyzing the Fabians rationale, that the ideological links of eugenic with democratic socialism is stronger than with Nazism, fascism and communism."

"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

"Selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature."

"In the same way as the state demands the death of its best men as soldiers, it is entitled to order the death of the condemned in its battle against epidemics and diseases. No antique sacrifices to gods and demons are demanded any longer, only a well considered expiation as a help for the community and indeed exclusively in its interest."

"Let me suggest that Dr. Galton's concession to the fact that there are differences of type to consider is only the beginning of a very big descent of concession, that may finally carry him very deep indeed. Eugenics, which is really only a new word for the popular American term "stirpiculture," seems to me to be a term that is not without its misleading implications. It has in it something of that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms, "evolution" and "the survival of the fittest." The implication is that the best reproduces and survives. Now really it is' the better that survives, and not the best. The real fact of the case is that in the all-around result the inferior usually perish, and the average of the species rises, but not that any exceptionally favorable variations get together and reproduce. I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."

"[N]o man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given."

"Any new set of conditions which renders a species' food and safety very easily obtained, seems to lead to degeneration."

"I was born human, but it was an accident of fate. … Humanity can change itself but hopefully it will be an individual choice. Those who want to stay human can and those who want to evolve into something much more powerful with greater capabilities can. There is no way I want to stay a mere human."

"Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs. Unless there is a change in the public mind every rank above the lowest must degenerate, and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly. The results are already visible in the degeneration of literature, newspapers, amusements (there was once a stock company playing Shakespeare in every considerable town), and, I am convinced, in benefactions like that of Lord Nuffield, a self-made man, to Oxford, which must gradually substitute applied science for ancient wisdom."

"Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes, and if our government cannot send them doctor and clinic it must, till it get tired of it, send monk and confession box. We cannot go back as some dreamers would have us, to the old way of big families everywhere, even if the intelligent classes would consent, because that old way worked through lack of science and consequent great mortality among the children of those least fitted for modem civilisation."

"The first task of the new man is to restore the values of the body. He starts out from the demands and attributes of the body. This is the great revolution of the twentieth century which a section of French intellectuals have dimly sensed but which they have not been able to grasp clearly and communicate to the nation: the revolution of the body, restoration of the body […] The new man starts with the body, he knows that the body is the articulation of the soul, and that the soul can only express itself, reveal itself, acquire substance in the body. There is nothing more spiritual than this recognition of the body. It is the soul that calls, that demands salvation, that saves itself by rediscovering the body.Nothing is less materialist than this movement. The pathetic mistake of the last generation of rationalists, one which summed up all the dissolution, all the bastardization of their pseudo-humanism, was to accuse of materialism a revolution which salvages and restores the sources and mainstays of the spirit."

"Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need [...] We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock."

"Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."

"Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house built upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit."

"As an advocate of birth control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes."

"The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

"If at some point even 20% of the population uses embryo selection, it would be more than enough to reverse the current trends that we are seeing."

"[It] cannot be uniform: every [social] class must create its own eugenics."

"The aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in their own way."

"The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members."

"What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry the War into the enemy’s country by reminding the public that the real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no restraint on debauchery as long as it is monogamic, whereas eugenic breeding would effectually protect the mothers and fathers of the race from any abuse of their relations. As to the domestic and sympathetic function of marriage, or even its selfishly sexual function, we need not interfere with that. ‘’’What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before, and never intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honor.’’’ That freedom once secured, and the conditions defined, we have nothing further to say in the matter until the necessarily distant time when the results of our alternative method of recruiting will be able to take the matter in hand themselves, and invite the world to reconsider its institutions in the light of experiments, which must, of course, in the meantime run concurrently with the promiscuity of ordinary marriage."

"Society must concern itself not chiefly with the isolation, temporary or permanent, of the individual murderer, thief, or forger, but with the extermination or repair of the genetic, educational, or industrial defects which cause the production of criminals."

"And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into their estimate of advantages."

"We have also the pedigrees of the dissolute, the feeble-minded, the idle, the defective. We find in these that evil and weakness rarely originate de novo, but that they are handed down as a baneful legacy from generation to generation."

"Poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material."

"The second [eugenic goal] is the limitation by public authority of the marriage of the defective, the insane, and the criminal."

"If Richard Roe by chance is defective, unable by heredity to rise to the level of helpfulness and happiness, it is not a wholesome act to help him to the responsibilities of parenthood. It is a wise charity to make him as comfortable as may be with the assurance that he shall be the last of his line."

"The strong races were born of hard times, they have fought for all they have had, and the strength of those they have conquered has entered into their wills. They have been selected by competition and sifted by the elements. They have risen through struggle and they have gained through mutual help, and by the power of the human will have made the earth their own."

"The dangers of foreign immigration lie in the overflow to our shores of hereditary unfitness. The causes that lead to degeneration have ling been at work among the poor of Europe."

"What scientific eugenics does aim for is for the elimination, by restriction, of hopeless hereditary feeble-mindedness and of defects which must condemn one’s posterity to ineffective and joyless lives."

"The crétin of Aosta has been developed as a new type of man. In fair weather the roads about are lined with these awful paupers - human beings with less intelligence than the goose and less decency than the pig."

"’’’The blood of a nation determines its history.’’’"

"Indiscriminate charity has been a fruitful cause of the survival of the unfit. To kill the strong and feed the weak is to provide for a progeny of weakness."

"The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be fathers of coming generations."

"The title of this essay is deliberately provocative. Eugenics can be thought of as any attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that enable them to thrive. Nearly everyone agrees that parents should provide an environment that promotes the welfare of their children. Advocates of eugenics add that we should also manipulate biology to promote well-being, provided we can do so without imposing undue risk on our children or on other people with whom they will share the planet."

"[T]here is so much we might do if intelligence rather than emotions controlled the quality of the oncoming race."

"[I]t would, if possible, be best absolutely to prohibit in every State in the Union the marriage of the physically, mentally and morally unfit."

"[T]he relation of pauperism, mental degeneracy and crime to heredity justifies community interference…"

"Thomas A. Storey, General Hygiene, 1920"

"It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today [...] We should literally replace all factors responsible for selection in a natural and free life [...] In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organization; otherwise, humanity will, for lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication."

"Thus there are increasing reasons for fearing, that while the progress of medical science and sanitation is saving from death a continually increasing number of the children of those who are feeble physically and mentally; many of those who are most thoughtful and best endowed with energy, enterprise and self-control are tending to defer their marriages and in other ways to limit the number of children whom they leave behind them."

"[P]ossibly the danger ultimately to be apprehended may be the very reverse of that which Malthus dreaded; that, in fact, when we have reached that point of universal plenty and universal cultivation to which human progress ought to bring us, the race will multiply too slowly rather than too fast. One such influence my be specified with considerable confidence,—namely, THE TENDENCY OF CEREBRAL DEVELOPMENT TO LESSEN FECUNDITY."

"The practical application of the doctrine of deferred marriage would therefore lead indirectly to most mischievous results, that were overlooked owing to the neglect of considerations bearing on race. (1907, p. 207)"

"“There is strong reason for believing that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence [“of the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population”]"

"Historically, eugenicists were focused not only on genetically heritable characteristics but also potentially effective environmental and cultural influences on children’s traits. Chinese eugenicists led the charge to eradicate foot binding, and implemented programs of maternal education so they could provide better care for infants. Eugenicists also initiated the mandatory treatment of infectious diseases like syphilis, which causes blindness, deafness, and cognitive disability. If you think women should be treated for sexually transmitted infections or rubella so they don’t have a disabled child, you’re advocating the same goals as many historical eugenicists"

"Those who rail against eugenics in any form engage in a technique where they conflate an easily defended position with a more difficult to defend position (AKA the Motte and Bailey strategy). The easily defended position is that we should not murder or forcibly sterilize people on the basis of their genetics or disability. This position is conflated with several more difficult-to-defend positions. These more difficult-to-defend positions include that we should not study the genetics of desirable or undesirable characteristics, that we should not label any characteristics as desirable or undesirable and that we should not consider how any policy could change the genetic propensities of future generations."

"Given how closely eugenics has been associated with Nazis and the Holocaust, it is interesting to consider the degree to which Jewish people have embraced eugenics. I wouldn’t be here to write this essay had my Jewish grandfather not fled the Nazis in the 1930s. The Talmud expressed eugenic principles about who could marry whom—for example, it is forbidden for a woman to marry a man with epilepsy— German genetic counselors are much more likely to express disapproval for eugenic principles than Israeli genetic counsellors. Israeli genetic counselors are more likely to endorse statements such as “it is socially irresponsible to knowingly give birth to an infant with a serious genetic disorder” and “it is important to reduce the number of deleterious genes in a population.” The Israeli National Program for the Detection and Prevention of Birth Defects offers free testing for many genetic diseases, and Israeli women are more likely to get tested than women in other countries."

"The Encyclopedia Britannica defines eugenics as “the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity.” Yet most people draw a blank when they hear the word, or else it conjures up images of swastikas and jack‑booted Nazis. Contrary to this warped image, eugenics has had a long history, extending back to ancient Rome and beyond."

"On the question of genetics and behavior, the egalitarians and the liberal media have tightly controlled public discourse, so for decades, only their side has been presented to the public. Is it any wonder the public accepts what they say uncritically? It’s certainly not anyone’s fault for believing it. If I didn’t happen to study and do research on IQ, I’d probably believe it, too. But then maybe someday, I might think to myself, “Why not just see what the other side has to say?” Many, many people are incapable of doing this, because they’re terrified the other side might be right, and to discover that they’ve been completely wrong would be such a jolt to their psyches they might never recover. Anyway, just imagine I summoned up the courage to venture into forbidden territory – I might read one really good book, such as The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray. I’d think to myself, “Gee, what a totally different world this is! It’s not a pretentious piece of propaganda like Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man – it’s down-to-earth, clearly stated, interesting, even engrossing. Hmmm . . . kind of exciting!”"

"Eugenics has become a dirty word in popular culture because of its excesses in the early twentieth century, including forced sterilization laws in the USA and Germany (which were applied to the ‘feebleminded’ but sometimes also to epileptics and even sexual deviants). But a lot of the criticism of eugenics conflates what Galton and many modern academics in bioethics mean by ‘eugenics’ with how the Nazis misused it [...] Moral grandstanding has become so common in connection with the word that journalists often use ‘eugenics’ to mean something like ‘unjust coercion of innocent parents’. But Galton and Darwin would have rejected this, and so should we. According to Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and past president of the Eugenics Society of England, ‘Eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human race’ [...] While people disagree about precisely which traits are worth promoting, what motivates eugenics is a concern that individual welfare depends in part on the average traits of a population, and that demographic trends matter to the extent that they influence the success or failure of entire populations."

"I cannot shake the conviction that life is (usually) worth living, and that we should continue to create the conditions for intelligent life to experience beauty, create art, discover how the world works, and continue to set and satisfy goals that presuppose a complex form of intelligence. It is at this point that our intuitions bottom out. If you think that life is pointless, given that we will leave no trace in 20 billion years, it is hard to know how to convince you to believe otherwise. An obligation to reproduce, no matter how weak it is, cannot exist unless there is value to the future experiences intelligent creatures will have."

"Evolution is path-dependent. Future populations will be shaped by the choices parents make now. These choices will be influenced by the social and political institutions they live under. It is up to us to think through what kinds of institutions we should create, and what kinds of future people should exist."

"[M]en cannot follow modern civilization along its present course, because they are degenerating. They have been fascinated by the beauty of the sciences of inert matter. They have not understood that their body and consciousness are subjected to natural laws, more obscure than, but as inexorable as, the laws of the sidereal world. Neither have they understood that they cannot transgress these laws without being punished. They must, therefore, learn the necessary relations of the cosmic universe, of their fellow men, and of their inner selves, and also those of their tissues and their mind. Indeed, man stands above all things. Should he degenerate, the beauty of civilization, and even the grandeur of the physical universe, would vanish. ... Humanity's attention must turn from the machines of the world of inanimate matter to the body and the soul of man, to the organic and mental processes which have created the machines and the universe of Newton and Einstein"

"We must single out the children who are endowed with high potentialities, and develop them as completely as possible. And in this manner give to the nation a non-hereditary aristocracy. Such children may be found in all classes of society, although distinguished men appear more frequently in distinguished families than in others. The descendants of the founders of American civilization may still possess the ancestral qualities. These qualities are generally hidden under the cloak of degeneration. But this degeneration is often superficial. It comes chiefly from education, idleness, lack of responsibility and moral discipline. The sons of very rich men, like those of criminals, should be removed while still infants from their natural surroundings. Thus separated from their family, they could manifest their hereditary strength. In the aristocratic families of Europe there are also individuals of great vitality. The issue of the Crusaders is by no means extinct. The laws of genetics indicate the probability that the legendary audacity and love of adventure can appear again in the lineage of the feudal lords. It is possible also that the offspring of the great criminals who had imagination, courage, and judgment, of the heroes of the French or Russian Revolutions, of the high-handed business men who live among us, might be excellent building stones for an enterprising minority. As we know, criminality is not hereditary if not united with feeble-mindedness or other mental or cerebral defects. High potentialities are rarely encountered in the sons of honest, intelligent, hard-working men who have had ill luck in their careers, who have failed in business or have muddled along all their lives in inferior positions. Or among peasants living on the same spot for centuries. However, from such people sometimes spring artists, poets, adventurers, saints. A brilliantly gifted and well-known New York family came from peasants who cultivated their farm in the south of France from the time of Charlemagne to that of Napoleon."

"We have mentioned that natural selection has not played its part for a long while. That many inferior individuals have been conserved through the efforts of hygiene and medicine. But we cannot prevent the reproduction of the weak when they are neither insane nor criminal. Or destroy sickly or defective children as we do the weaklings in a litter of puppies. The only way to obviate the disastrous predominance of the weak is to develop the strong. Our efforts to render normal the unfit are evidently useless. We should, then, turn our attention toward promoting the optimum growth of the fit. By making the strong still stronger, we could effectively help the weak; For the herd always profits by the ideas and inventions of the elite. Instead of leveling organic and mental inequalities, we should amplify them and construct greater men."

"The progress of the strong depends on the conditions of their development and the possibility left to parents of transmitting to their offspring the qualities which they have acquired in the course of their existence. Modern society must, therefore, allow to all a certain stability of life, a home, a garden, some friends. Children must be reared in contact with things which are the expression of the mind of their parents. It is imperative to stop the transformation of the farmer, the artisan, the artist, the professor, and the man of science into manual or intellectual proletarians, possessing nothing but their hands or their brains. The development of this proletariat will be the everlasting shame of industrial civilization. It has contributed to the disappearance of the family as a social unit, and to the weakening of intelligence and moral sense. It is destroying the remains of culture. All forms of the proletariat must be suppressed. Each individual should have the security and the stability required for the foundation of a family. Marriage must cease being only a temporary union. The union of man and woman, like that of the higher anthropoids, ought to last at least until the young have no further need of protection. The laws relating to education, and especially to that of girls, to marriage, and divorce should, above all, take into account the interest of children. Women should receive a higher education, not in order to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, but to rear their offspring to be valuable human beings. The free practice of eugenics could lead not only to the development of stronger individuals, but also of strains endowed with more endurance, intelligence, and courage. These strains should constitute an aristocracy, from which great men would probably appear. Modern society must promote, by all possible means, the formation of better human stock. No financial or moral rewards should be too great for those who, through the wisdom of their marriage, would engender geniuses. The complexity of our civilization is immense. No one can master all its mechanisms. However, these mechanisms have to be mastered. There is need today of men of larger mental and moral size, capable of accomplishing such a task. The establishment of a hereditary biological aristocracy through voluntary eugenics would be an important step toward the solution of our present problems."

"[T]he conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts."

"L'intelligence est presque inutile à celui qui ne possède qu'elle."

"The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous."

"The existence of finality within the organism is undeniable. Each part seems to know the present and future needs of the whole, and acts accordingly. The significance of time and space is not the same for our tissues as for our mind. The body perceives the remote as well as the near, the future as well as the present."

"The democratic creed does not take account of the constitution of our body and of our consciousness. It does not apply to the concrete fact which the individual is. Indeed, human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their right is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals. Sexes are not equal. To disregard all their inequalities is dangerous. The democratic principle has contributed to the collapse of civilization in opposing the development of an elite."

"Man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor."

"I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary."

"The long period of the dark ages... is due... in a very considerable degree, to the celebacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted... deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature, or to art... they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the Church. ...celibacy. ...thus, by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal... the Church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. ...as if she had aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders would use, who aimed at creating ferocious, currish, and stupid natures. ... The policy of the religious world in Europe... by means of persecutions... brought thousands of the foremost thinkers and men of political aptitudes to the scaffold, or imprisoned them during a large part of their manhood, or drove them as emigrants into other lands. ...Hence the Church, having first captured all the gentle natures and condemned them to celibacy, made another sweep of her huge nets ...to catch those who were the most fearless, truth-seeking, and intelligent ...and therefore the most suitable parents of a high civilization, and put a strong check, if not a direct stop, to their progeny. Those she reserved... to breed the generations of the future, were the servile, the indifferent, and again, the stupid. Thus, as she... brutalized human nature by her system of celibacy applied to the gentle, she demoralised it by her system of persecution of the intelligent, the sincere, and the free."

"The best form of civilization in respect to the improvement of the race, would be one in which society was not costly; where incomes were chiefly derived from professional sources, and not much through inheritance; where every lad had a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal help of the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in his early youth; where marriage was held in as high honour as in ancient Jewish times; where the pride of race was encouraged (of course I do not refer to the nonsensical sentiment of the present day, that goes under that name); where the weak could find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods, and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalized."

"A collection of living magnates in various branches of intellectual achievement is always a feast to my eyes; being, as they are, such massive, vigorous, capable-looking animals."

"It was only the feeling that, at least in one or two aspects of Francis Galton's later life and of his scientific work, I could perhaps put his contributions to human knowledge more adequately than possibly one or another who might take up the task, if I resigned it, and who would hardly grasp the bearing of that long and intimate scientific correspondence between Galton, Weldon and myself, that I persevered in my endeavour to give some account of a life, wherein an important chapter of personal development must remain largely unrecorded."

"[I]t was soon clear to me that I was collecting as much information bearing on the family history of Charles Darwin as on that of Francis Galton. It seemed desirable to place the two men to some extent in contrast in my volume, showing in ancestry, in methods of work and in outlook on life what they had in common and how they differed."

"If my view be correct, Erasmus Darwin planted the seed of suggestion in questioning whether adaptation meant no more to man than illustration of creative ingenuity; the one grandson, Charles Darwin, collected the facts which had to be dealt with and linked them together by wide-reaching hypotheses; the other grandson, Francis Galton, provided the methods by which they could be tested..."

"Those who know the real history of the one occasion on which Galton and Darwin disagreed know how loyal Galton was to Darwin—loyal with a loyalty far rarer to-day. Galton would not have wished me to put him in the same rank as his master, but the reader who follows my story to the end may possibly see that the ramifications of Galton's methods are producing a renascence in innumerable branches of science..."

"[T]his work... is intended fundamentally as a permanent memorial to the Founder of the , and embraces material which may easily perish or be ultimately lost sight of. ...My object is... to issue a volume to some extent worthy of the name of the man it bears,—which may be studied hereafter by those who wish to understand him, his origin and his aims..."

"[T]his work is not written to gain a public, but piam memoriam prodere conditoris nostri and is intended especially for those who have known and loved Francis Galton in the past, or who may in the future desire to understand and honour him."

"During the course of many years of investigation into the plant life of the world, creating new forms, modifying old ones, adapting others to new conditions, and blending still others, I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life."

"The mere crossing of species, unaccompanied by selection, wise supervision, intelligent care, and the utmost patience, is not likely to result in marked good, and may result in vast harm. Unorganized effort is often most vicious in its tendencies."

"Let me lay emphasis on the opportunity now presented in the United States for observing and, if we are wise, aiding in what I think it fair to say is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration."

"Look at the material on which to draw. Here is the North, powerful, virile, aggressive, blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more impetuous South. Again you have the merging of a cold phlegmatic temperament with one mercurial and volatile. Still again the union of great native mental strength, developed or undeveloped, with bodily vigor, but with inferior mind. See, too, what a vast number of environmental influences have been at work in social relations, in climate, in physical surroundings. Along with this we must observe the merging of the vicious with the good, the good with the good, the vicious with the vicious."

"Do not be cross with the child; you cannot afford it. If you are cultivating a plant, developing it into something finer and nobler, you must love it, not hate it; be gentle with it, not abusive; be firm, never harsh. I give the plants upon which I am at work in a test, whether a single one or a hundred thousand, the best possible environment. So should it be with a child, if you want to develop it in right ways. Let the children have music, let them have pictures, let them have laughter, let them have a good time; not an idle time but one full of cheerful occupation. Surround them with all the beautiful things you can. Plants should be given sun and air and the blue sky; give them to your boys and girls. ...for all the years. We cannot treat a plant tenderly one day and harshly the next; they cannot stand it. Remember that you are training not only for to-day, but for all the future, for all posterity."

"There is not a single desirable attribute which, lacking in a plant, may not be bred into it. Choose what improvement you wish in a flower, a fruit, or a tree, and by crossing, selection, cultivation, and persistence you can fix this desirable trait irrevocably."

"Pick out any trait you want in your child... By surrounding this child with sunshine from the sky and your own heart, by giving the closest communion with nature, by feeding this child well-balanced, nutritious food, by giving it all that is implied in healthful environmental influences, and by doing all in love, you can thus cultivate in the child and fix there for all its life all of these traits."

"Here appears a child plainly not normal, what shall we do with him? Shall we, as some have advocated, even from Spartan days, hold that the weaklings should be destroyed? No. In cultivating plant life, while we destroy much that is unfit, we are constantly on the lookout for what has been called the abnormal, that which springs apart in new lines. How many plants are there in the world to-day that were not in one sense once abnormalities? No; it is the influence of cultivation, of selection, of surroundings, of environment, that makes the change from the abnormal to the normal. From the children we are led to call abnormal, may come, under wise cultivation and training, splendid normal natures."

"In child rearing environment is equally essential with heredity."

"When certain hereditary tendencies are almost indelibly ingrained, environment will have a hard battle to effect a change in the child; but that a change can be wrought by the surroundings we all know. The particular subject may at first be stubborn against these influences, but repeated application of the same modifying forces in succeeding generations will at last accomplish the desired object in the child as it does in the plant."

"But with those who are mentally defective—ah, here is the hardest question of all!—what shall be done with them? ...In the case of human beings in whom the light of reason does not burn... shall they be eliminated from the race? Go to the mother of an imbecile child and get your answer. ...For these helpless unfortunates, as with those who are merely unfortunate from environment, I should enlist the best and broadest state aid."

"Heredity is not the dark specter which some people have thought—merciless and unchangeable, the embodiment of Fate itself. This dark, pessimistic belief which tinges even the literature of to-day comes, no doubt, from the general lack of knowledge of the laws governing the interaction of these two ever-present forces of heredity and environment wherever there is life. My own studies have led me to be assured that heredity is only the sum of all past environment, in other words environment is the architect of heredity; and I am assured of another fact: acquired characters are transmitted and—even further—that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired..."

"We may compare this sum of the life forces, which we call heredity, to the character of a sensitive plate in the camera. Outside pictures impress themselves more or less distinctly on the sensitive plate... Stored within heredity are all joys, sorrows, loves, hates, music, art, temples, palaces, pyramids, hovels, kings, queens, paupers, bards, prophets and philosophers, oceans, caves, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes, wars, triumphs, defeats, reverence, courage, wisdom, virtue, love and beauty, time, space, and all the mysteries of the universe. The appropriate environments will bring out and intensify all these general human hereditary experiences and quicken them again into life and action, thus modifying for good or evil, character—heredity—destiny."

"Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education. By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome."

""Epic of evolution" is a term that, within the past three years, has become the theme and title of a number of gatherings. It seems to have been first used by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson in 1978.* "The evolutionary epic," Wilson wrote in his book On Human Nature, "is probably the best myth we will ever have." Myth as falsehood was not the usage intended by Wilson in this statement. Rather, myth as a grand narrative that provides a people with a placement in time—a meaningful placement that celebrates extraordinary moments of a shared heritage. The epic of evolution is science translated into meaningful story."

"A single tale of such holy and mysterious content as to capture the soul – scientific in its data, mythic in its form."

"a shared sacred story that honors both objective truth and subjective meaning: For the first time in human history we have a creation story that not only addresses life’s biggest questions—Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here? How are we to live?—but helps us answer those questions in ways that are both religiously inspiring and scientifically accurate. No longer are subjective meaning and objective truth isolated from one another in separate domains. Both are conveyed through the same story."

"How can the epic of evolution be told in a multitude of personally and collectively meaningful (mythic) ways, so that it inspires billions of human beings with different worldviews to really want, and then successfully manifest, this vision?"

""epic of evolution" as the sacred unfolding of creation...."

"I shall argue in the pages ahead that Darwin has gifted us with an account of life whose depth, beauty and pathos-when seem in the contest of the larger cosmic Epic of Evolution — exposes us afresh to the raw reality of the sacred and to a resoundingly meaningful universe … theologically interpreted, therefore, the Epic of Evolution is the story of the world's struggle – not always successful or linearly progressive — towards an expansive freedom in the pressure of self-giving grace … We can root our moral life in the cosmic Epic of Evolution in a manner that goes much deeper than that suggested by sociobiologists"

"One can only speak of creation as a process because of the evidence of what often is called the 'epic of evolution': the whole sequence, as unveiled by a gamut of the sciences, from the origins of the universe to the 'hot big bang' to the arrival of homo sapiens on planet earth"

"The Epic of Evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment... The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story—what we are calling religious naturalism —can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions."

"The Epic of Evolution is the 14 billion year narrative of cosmic, planetary, life, and cultural evolution—told in sacred ways. Not only does it bridge mainstream science and a diversity of religious traditions; if skillfully told, it makes the science story memorable and deeply meaningful, while enriching one's religious faith or secular outlook."

"The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic."

"The theologian could rewrite the Epic of Evolution by expanding on the story told by the scientist. The theologian could declare that this evolutionary story has had a plot all along. When God created the world in the beginning, according to this option, God placed a potential into creation which now through evolution is becoming actualized."

"This epic of evolution covers far more than the story of the evolution of biological life. It is the evolving tale of the creativity, complexity and emergence of new and novel phenomena that comprises all that is today"

"We can root our morality in the epic of evolution in a manner that goes much deeper than that suggested by sociobiologists"

"When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos"

"The epic of evolution is an attempt at natural history, to be sure – telling the story of the universe, zooming from a macro-story to the micro-story of planet Earth and the human species"

"The epic of evolution not only unifies the natural and social sciences; it bridges science and religion, fact and value, and it smoothly blends the scientifically objective with the culturally relative. The epic also addresses humanity’s most pressing questions. If as a species we are to understand and solve our common problems, if we are to guide our story’s unfolding, we need to understand, in the deep and human way that only story can convey, both our evolutionary past and our future options. We need the epic."

"In constructing what we are calling the epic of evolution we are thus taking up religious issues of the most fundamental sort, issues ultimately quite baffling and obscure and shrouded in mystery."

"The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics."

"It is important to acknowledge again how bioethics discussions within and among religious communities reveal features that generally distinguish them from self-consciously secular approaches to bioethics. While it is to be expected that different interpretations of text, tradition, method, and authority often lead to different conclusions among religious traditions in their respective judgments on particular topics, it seems equally clear that religious understandings, although nuanced differently among various faith communities, often reveal broadly shared characteristics that stand in stark contrast to the moral minimalism at work in many secular approaches. Such similarities should not be that surprising. For the convictions at work in religious this often eventuate in a discernible consensus among traditions that nonetheless remain distinct in their understandings of ecclesiology, method, and authority. Theological arguments characteristically function in a richer, more robust fashion than the lowest-common denominator, procedurally driven arguments at work in secular perspectives. While that robustness of vision poses challenges to the development of a common morality workable at the level of policy, it also invites a broader conversation about, if not a prophetic challenge to, the assumptions that undergird much of the conventional wisdom in bioethics discussion."

"[Bioethics] is "a phony branch of elite philosophy whose principle purpose seems to be to justify allowing badly ill or disabled people to die.""

"The aim of bioethics is to identify ethical problems raised by critical decision making in healthcare, and by genetic engineering and biotechnology research into microorganisms. Most of the key bioethical issues, especially the ones related to human life sprung from a debate between principles of morality, the development of science, and its potential contribution to ‘better living standards’, all framed within different cultural backgrounds. Bioethical research will thus take place interactively with other related disciplinary ethics. In the bioethical debate it is important not only to take on board the general perception of norms, but also to question until what extent bioethics will reshape those norm."

"Christian bioethics is a puzzle. The very name suggests an ethics other than one for humans generally. Can there be an ethics just for certain humans? Has a special ethics been given to Christians as the Torah was given to Israel? Can there be an ethics for all people, but which only some people can know or know fully?"

"An exploration of Christian bioethics at the beginning of the 21st century might with relief be regarded as anachronistic, as a matter of the past. This side of the Renaissance and the French Revolution, the once-Christian West is increasingly post-Christian. Though in some countries a particular Christianity is still established – in Germany, two – their role and force for public policy are progressively marginalized in the framing of law and public policy. There is no society that is unabashedly Christian, as Spain under Franco or Portugal under Salazar had been Christian."

"In many ways it is anachronistic to use this term prior to the 1970s, for the phenomenon of bioethics was in many ways associated with the deprofessionalization of medical ethics and its reconceptualization as a secular, philosophically oriented discipline independent of the health care profession."

"Secular bioethics emerged out of the Enlightenment hope to disclose a secular ethic that could transcend the multiplicity of Christianities and their moralities. This Enlightenment hope has persisted despite the bloodshed of the French and October Revolutions, leading among other things to the emergence of the medical humanities and the contemporary high expectations from a secular bioethics."

"The Roman Catholic medical-ethical handbooks and compendia of moral theology that emerged at the end of the 19th century and enjoyed a flourishing in the 1950s have a continuity with Roman Catholic moral theological reflections, reaching to the beginning of the 16th century and to the flowering of Western scientific interest in medicine and its foundational sciences. From the 16th century onward, moral theological interest in medicine was driven by the remarkable medical progress after the Renaissance. Even Descartes (1596-1650) thought he could extend life, given the promise of medical knowledge. Medicine claimed importance before it could convey much benefit. Though therapeutic benefits came later, there were striking advances in knowledge. From Vesalius to Harvey to Morgagni through Bichat and Virchow and the explosion of medical science in the 19th century. New construals of research and science altered the very meaning of medical knowledge. In contrast, in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) there developed a continuity in Roman Catholic moral theological reflections that extended unbroken into the early 1960s. Roman Catholic moral thought had a previous substantial change in its character when it passed from the pre-Scholastic to the Scholastic period. The pre-Scholastic era, which was pastoral in its character, was much loser in its theological spirit to that o the Church of the first millennium. The Scholastic period, which began in the 12th century and extended to the Council of Trent, was marked by a concern with discursive rational reflection and systematization. The modern period, which began with Trent, in great measure carried forward the Scholastic tradition, but now more fully developed. It was in this period that reflections on medicine became the focus of whole works and began to constitute a sub-discipline of moral theology. This post-Tridentine, medical-ethical, moral theological literature was insightful. It constituted much more than merely wooden applications of past reflections. This significant body of Roman Catholic medical ethical reflection and scholarship was characterized by its constituting a single coherent community of research."

"A common sense of doing Christian medical ethics or bioethics was available for Roman Catholics until the mid-1960s. As John Berkman observes, “The conceptual continuity in moral theology is clearly visible from the manuals themselves, which in 1950 maintained the same basic structure and categories of the manuals which begin in 1605.” There was a confidence in the ability of moral theological reflection to answer the questions posed by new technological and scientific developments."

"At the end of the 19th century, there was a significant increase in Roman Catholic moral theological investigations concerning matters medical. The moral theological handbook tradition turned to the needs of physicians, priests, and nurses. During this same period, new medical techniques were being developed and new understandings of etiology, pathogenesis, and therapy were gaining salience. A good proportion of contemporary surgical procedures trace their roots to this period, which enjoyed the combination of anesthesia with Lister’s asepsis. During this period the germ theory became well established and the first steps were taken in the development of antisera as medical treatments. The emergence of contemporary medicine motivated theological reflections. This was a period within which various aspirations to progress, secularization and modernization brought into question traditional Christian commitments. After the Second World War, there was continued acceleration in the tempo of scientific and technological progress. The response was a further development of the religious medical-ethical literature, to which not only Roman Catholics, but also Protestants and Jews began to make numerous contributions. Initially, the Roman Catholic response was both vigorous and in continuity with its manualist tradition. The Christian bioethics that took shape in the 1970s developed a character quite different from the Roman Catholic medical-ethical tradition of the past. It did not so much produce manuals or guides for the perplexed physician, nurse, or believer, as it did reports of theological perplexity. The guides were themselves often disoriented: the moral theologians on whom bioethicists might draw were frequently unsure as to the character of appropriate moral guidance. Roman Catholic bioethical scholarship took on the character of a moral science in confusion: moral theology was in search of its foundations. As Roman Catholicism passed through the aftermath of Vatican II, it became impossible to carry forward the tradition of medical-ethical reflection that had taken shape at the beginning of the 17th century. This rupture in the tradition of Roman Catholic bioethical reflections was associated with the religious changes that occurred in Roman Catholicism following Vatican II. Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) began a revolution as he sought to bring “ecclesiastical discipline into closer accord with the needs and conditions of our times.”"

"Christian bioethics as a family of bioethics had a brief and significant flowering. For some two decades it commanded a centrality in the public debate regarding the new medicine. It then receded from public policy discussions. This is not to deny that a rich and often thoughtful literature continued to grow, nurtured by authors from evangelical as well as other perspectives. Christian bioethics simply no longer commands the public notice it once enjoyed. During its flourishing, Protestant bioethicists such as Paul Ramsey and Stanley Haurwas claimed a prominent place for Christian bioethics. Their reflections garnered enough broad attention. Initially, the novelty of the debates was itself engaging, even as an old paradigm of Christian bio ethic collapsed, and many scholars energetically struggled to erect diverse new ones. During the 1960s and early 1970s the various Christian bioethics flourished at the vanguard of bioethical scholarship, so that in this period one could not have given an adequate account of medical ethics of bioethics without taking into account of the work of Christian thinkers such as Ramsey and Hauerwas. Yet, just as secular bioethics assumed an important role for public policy Christian bioethics receded in cultural significance and force. Christian bioethics served as an intermediate step in the emergence of secular bioethics. In part, this was due to Christian bioethics attempting to speak to the world in secular rather than in Christian terms. By discounting its particularity, Christian bioethics marginalized the importance of what it could offer. As Stanley Hauerwas had argued, this has been one of the major forces in the recent decline of Christian bioethics."

"Other factors were also influential in making a secular bioethics appear more attractive than a Christian bioethics. The secularization of the culture made the consideration of a Christian bioethics as a source of moral guidance unappealing. Reliance on traditional authority figures came to be regarded as pejoratively paternalistic, if not as an expression of a false consciousness. Traditional Christian morality interpreted by an authoritative hierarchy was at loggerheads with the view that society should be open, liberal, and pluralist. The very notion of a religious tradition as a source of moral judgment collided with an emerging sense of autonomy and individual rights. Indeed, traditional Christianity is not only hierarchical but robustly patriarchal. It takes seriously the declaration of St. Paul that “the head of the woman is the man” (1 Cor 11:3) and that “man was not created on account of woman, but woman on account of the man” (I Cor 11:9). Although accepting men and women as equally called to salvation, traditional Christianity recognized them in a hierarchy of honor and authority. Against the backdrop of the rights movements of the 1960s and their rejection of traditional claims of social authority, traditional Christian understandings were not only unacceptable and embarrassing, but to be positively rejected. Traditional Christian commitments came to be regarded as exploitative, thus driving a deep cultural wedge between traditional and post-Christianities."

"In an age that endorses diversity, while considering real disparities of belief as threatening, Christian bioethics, or at least traditional Christian bioethics, presented differences that matter, and that are therefore threatening. The Western history of religious wars and inquisitorial coercion encumbered Christian bioethics with a past that made its contemporary undertaking suspect. In a world bloodied by its response to difference, Christian bioethics offered to divide Christian from non-Christian, and Christian from Christian, seeming to endanger the fabric of a peaceable society. The particular content of Christian bioethics was a possible enemy off tolerance an a friend of conflict. Having engendered the religious wars of the past, Christianity of the mid 20th century was engendering the culture wars of the future. From the perspective of post-traditional Christians, and indeed in terms of many of the rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, traditional Christianity was reactionary at best. It resisted progressive liberalism’s commitment to freeing persons and social structures from the constraining hands of the past. It saw in abortion and the emerging contraceptive ethos not avenues of liberation but roads to damnation. Rather than celebrating this ethos of choice as a liberation from the tyrant of biological forces, which has subjected women to men, traditional Christianity recognized in the secular revolutions affirmation of extramarital sex, the contraceptive ethos, and abortion, as only a further enslavement to the passions and chaos they bring. Disagreements about these matters within Christianity itself heightened the moral confusion of the time. Christian bioethics, rather than providing a means to resolve bioethical controversies and to achieve a general consensus concerning health care policy, fueled further controversy."

"T o summarize, when Christian bioethics turned to the challenges of providing moral guidance for the new high-technology medicine, it found itself unequal to the task. The difficulties were multiple and deeply rooted in contemporary Christianity. Christianity was divided into a diversity of Christianites; it could not give unambiguous guidance. Given the plurality of visions, one could disingenuously select within rather broad constraints the religious perspective to approve behavior one wanted to embrace (e.g., if one wanted to find religious approval of artificial insemination by a donor, one needed only to select the appropriate Christian theologian). The mainline Christian religions were themselves in disarray about what it mean to be Christian: from within many Christian religions unambiguous guidance was often unavailable because centuries-old approaches to resolving moral controversies had been abandoned or rejected. Just as Christian bioethics had the opportunity to provide guidance for contemporary health care policy, Christianity seemed unclear as to what ethics it should offer. In consequence,, the relevance of Christianity to the modern would could not be doubted. As if this were not bad enough, the surrounding couture had grounds to regard Christianity as a threat to a democratic and open polity for several reasons. First, traditional Christianity sought answers to moral problems within a hierarchical structure, rather than from individual reasoning and choice unfettered by constraints of the past. Second, Christianity hierarchical structure was patriarchal. Third, Christianity, by the particularity of its moral commitments, accented differences rather than encouraging the emergence of a moral consensus to which all could subscribe fourth, Christianity, insofar as it offered an ethics that contrasted with a secular ethics, could not provide guidance for public institutions or policy in the secular pluralist societies that had emerged in the West after the Second World War. The Christianness of Christian bioethics was itself problematic."

"In the wake of the Enlightenment, it seemed necessary to articulate a medical ethics not reliant on traditional Christian morality or its various expressions in informal codes of gentlemanly behavior. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century medical ethical treatises of a secular nature became salient. Much of this occurred as codes of medical ethics of etiquette were crafted for the medical professions. There was the perceived need formally and secularly to determine the nature of proper medical behavior. As one entered the 20th century, there was a heightened recognition that old traditions could not guide and that a new medical morality was needed For example, a British secular medical ethics text published in 1902 acknowledges that “it is not sufficient to say, as some people do, that medical ethics may be summed up in the Golden Rule, or that a man has only to behave like a gentleman. The author recognizes that the guiding mores were changing so that “what was regarded as customary and even proper some years ago, has often come to be universally condemned.” It I as if the author protested to much in denying that “our conception of Christianity and chivalry had undergone a complete revolution within the same period.” Cultural, religious, scientific, technological, and economic developments were recasting th landscape of medical practice. Philosophy promised for health care in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980 what it had offered European societies in the 17th and 18th centuries: a rationally defensible ethics that can bid humans as such and justify in secular terms a content-rich account of human rights, duties, proper character, virtue, sentiments of care, etc. The medical humanities in the 1960s and 1970s recaptured the aspirations of the first, second, and third humanisms. The first humanism in the late 15th and 16th centuries claimed a basis for human dignity over against the emerging Christian religious divisions of the time. At the same time it reaffirmed classical Greek an Roman pagan ideals of paideia, philanthropia, and humanitas. The second humanism at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries continues Enlightenment themes in promising a cultivation proper to human as such. The third humanism and so-called New Humanism, which surfaced at the end of the 19th an beginning of the 20th centuries, anticipated the medical humanities movements of the 1960s and 1970s. the humanities were invoked to place the new sciences and technologies within the context of immanent human values and to provide a moral unity for an increasingly secular culture. The medical humanities in the 1960s and later bioethics were engaged with similar expectations: to disclose the values and goals proper to humans, so as to bind all in a coherent and well-directed technological culture. There was an additional claim: medicine and the humanities were recognized as mutually supporting. Medicine as a project of human caring was itself construed as one of the humanities. Its fully self-conscious appreciation was sought in the humanities. On the other, hand, the traditional humanities found a concrete bond to the human condition through their contact with medicine. The humanities could strengthen the tie between medicine and human values. Medicine, for its part, could reconnect the humanities with the human condition, saving them from being isolated scholarly pursuits. The vision of medicine and the humanities found it epiphany in Edmund Pelligrinos perceptive and provocative rallying cry:” Medicine is the most humane of sciences, the most empiric of arts, and the most scientific of humanities.” The humanities, rejuvenated from contact with medicine, were not just an academic undertaking or a cultural achievement. According to Pellegrino, they were also to constitute a personal moral calling. The humanist must also be “authentic.” The medical setting requires that the humanist incorporate the values he or she professes an the character traits that are embodiments of the liberal arts teachings, to be human if not humane…truly, the humanist must be “holier than thou.”"

"The challenge of providing a secular foundation for bioethics can be seen as defined historically against three fundamental Western experiences of fracture and rupture: (1) the Reformation with its consequent fragmentation of Western Christendom into a plurality of Christianities and Christendoms, (2) the Enlightenment with its formation of a secular, intellectual culture, which aspired to transcend this diversity, and (3) post-modernity with its recognition that are returned to this diversity, given the Enlightenment's failure to justify a single, canonical, content-full morality by discursive reason alone. These experiences frame the moral geography for current debates regarding bioethics. They establish taken-for-granted expectations regarding moral diversity, the role of secular morality in spanning religious moral difference, and the contemporary experience of post-modernity. They account as well for a kind of nostalgia felt for the moral unity of the Western Middle Ages expressed in various hopes to see humans bound in a universal moral community governed by a global bioethics enforced legally across the world and in a persistent faith that discursive moral rationality can establish a universal ethic, despite its many failures."

"There is a continuity between the discursive, rational commitments of the Scholasticism that emerged in the 13th century and the Enlightenment project of providing rational account of proper moral probity. Although the Enlightenment attempted to give an account of morality undirected by revelation and ecclesiastical authority, thus involving a substantive break with previous moral assumptions, the Enlightenment as well as Scholasticism share a substantive commitment to reason’s abilities to provide outside of right worship and right belief a universal account of morality. Bioethics as it took shape in the 1970s reflected a late-Enlightenment attempt to provide a secular surrogate for the religious moral authorities that had once guided the West (Engelhardt, 2002). Secular and Western Christian bioethics have drawn on philosophical assumptions regarding the capacities of discursive reflection. They both have a penchant for attempting to identify moral truths with the deliverances of systematic moral reflections. In contrast, Orthodox Christianity lives in an understanding of morality uncompromised by Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment."

"Because Orthodox morality is primarily therapeutic, it is not juridical. The goal is not to do justice but to bring God’s mercy to the repentant. Although any falling short of the mark of saintly perfection is sinful, the response to sin is not punitive (e.g., penance is not punishment but treatment). Bioethics should be healing, aimed at restoring through repentance and purification the individual’s focus on God."

"Orthodox bioethics is not natural-law oriented. Unlike Western Christianity, which came to look for traces of God in nature, Orthodox Christianity approaches nature as an icon, as a window through which to see God, with the result that Orthodox Christianity is innocent of the natural-law theory of the West (Foltz, 2001)."

"Orthodox Christians hold that Christian bioethics is non-developmental in the sense of affirming the same moral commitments and insights that directed the Church of the first thousand years: it understands that all that has been essential for the appropriate moral life has been available since the time of the Apostles. This difference from Western secular and religious moral philosophical understandings is in part grounded in the Orthodox Christian recognition that truth is not merely a what (i.e., a set of discursive propositions referring to an objective truth) but a radically transcendent Who (i.e., the Trinity), with Whom since Pentecost right-worshipping Christians have had the possibility of a full relationship."

"In approaching new technological developments, the present is set within the now of the past. In addressing issues such as cloning, the use of embryonic stem cells, and germ-line genetic engineering, Orthodox Christians will not seek new moral insights. There will not be a search for new medical-ethical or bio-ethical principles, but the recall of a permanent possibility for epistemic insight grounded in the consequences of the Incarnation. The goal will be to provide an expression of an abiding truth in part guided by the writings of the Fathers but always crucially sustained by the presence of the Holy Spirit, so as to express in a new context the enduring moral consciousness of the Church."

"The obligation to become involved in sin (i.e., to engage in an activity that by itself falls short of the mark) to pursue salvation requires confronting moral issues within a value framework that at times does not produce black-and-white choices (through idolatry, sexual impurity, and murder of the innocent are always forbidden). Given this moral framework, the bioethics of Orthodox Christian physicians, nurses, families, and patients is often at odds with the reigning expectations of the surrounding secular society, as well as the moral views embraced by many Christians. This disparity of moral vision is expressed in competing understandings of proper professional conduct. For instance, Orthodox Christian physicians should not consider themselves obliged to be religiously and morally neutral in their care of their patients. Although they should avoid coercion of any sort (Caon CXIX of Carthage, A,D, 419), the ideal is to bring all who can be influenced into a life of right worship and right belief. For example, the Orthodox Church celebrates holy physicians such as St. Panteleimon (304) who took advantage off their professional role to convert their patients. Rather than regarding the patients’ vulnerability as a ground for not attempting to exert influence, Orthodox Christianity regards confrontations with pain, suffering, and death as opportunities to open the way to repentance and conversion. Traditional Orthodox Christianity does not affirm the abandonment by physicians of their Christian duties in favor of the norms of a secular medical ethics."

"The history of Roman Catholic bioethics is completely intermingled with that of Catholic morality more generally. Although that morality continues to be expounded and developed by moralists working in the Roman Catholic tradition, its overall history is largely unwritten. There is, of course, a large body of established scholarly work on the great figures of Roman Catholic moral theory, especially on St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine there are also studies on the history of Catholic moral teaching on particular moral issues, including abortion (Connery 1977), the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary treatments (Cronin, 1989), and contraception (Noonan, 1965). Finally, there are systematic treatments of Catholic bioethics (Ashley & O’Rourke, 19889). But there is no comprehensive study of the history of Catholic moral theology, much less the history of Catholic bioethics. In particular, little has been done to trace the development of Catholic moral thought in the period most essential for the development of distinctive Roman Catholic positions in bioethics – that is, the period from the sixteenth century Spanish scholastics to the dominance of the moral manuals in the half century before Vatican Council II."

"There is an institutional explanation for the development of bioethics within Roman Catholic moral thought. Catholics, especially those in religious orders, have been institutionally involved in health care throughout its technological and institutional development. This is especially true of catholic involvement in hospitals over the last 150 years, the period in which health care developed into its present institutional form (Kaufmann, 1999). The moral questions raised in the institutional context of catholic health care, especially those involving difficult cases related to sexual morality, pregnancy, and end of life issues, provoked a pedagogical literature directed at nurses, physicians, and others. That literature is clearly continuous with, and an ancestor of, modern secular bioethics. Moreover, the institutional focus continues, for example, in the American bishops’ ‘’Ethical Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1994 and 2001)"

"The vocabulary and leading ideas of Catholic bioethics have developed out of the moral work of the great scholastic theologians, most notably from the moral analyses of St. Thomas Aquinas. This tradition of moral thought is often called “natural law theory” or the “natural law tradition” after a dominant component of Aquinas’s time, with notable highlights in the work of the 16th century Spanish scholastics, the 17th century causists, the 18th century synthesis of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, and the revival of Thomistic study in the ate 19th and 20th centuries. The working method throughout this period has been a form of casuistry: new and difficult cases were compared and contrasted with clearer, paradigm cases to illuminate their morally important properties so as to allow their correct moral classification is compatible with the absolutism that characterizes catholic moral analysis: the morally important properties of actions, once revealed by casuistry shows a certain form of intervention in pregnancy involves an intention to end or, more precisely, to shorten the life of the fetus, then the intervention is excluded by the exceptionless prohibition against intentionally killing the innocent."

"As we have seen, Roman Catholic bioethics is a conceptually and institutionally mature set of inquiries. It has deep historical roots within catholic theology, doctrine, and canon law, and consequently a developed set of positions and methods of moral analysis. Although traditional authorities are accorded some respect by all engaged as Roman Catholics in bioethics, there are very significant disagreements among Catholic bioethicists. These disagreement reach so deeply into the fabric of moral life an thought that they suggest radical fissures within the Catholic community. These divisions of moral conviction would not be troubling if they were simply about new and difficult cases or about casuistical details; but, as the preceding summaries and citations indicate, they go to the heart of key norms themselves. The resolution of the most central of these disagreements is surely essential if the traditions of Catholic moralizing are to be effectively brought to bear on the bioethical perplexities facing the Roman Catholic community and others who may look to its riches for guidance."

"Religious naturalism is an approach to experiencing and appreciating nature with the awe, reverence, and respect that are usually associated with religion, but without the metaphysical paraphernalia of the latter."

"Religious naturalism is a perspective that finds religious meaning in the natural world and rejects the notion of a supernatural realm."

"Religious naturalism is a belief in the natural order as understood by ongoing scientific investigation, supported by a strong and positive emotional feeling about the wonder and efficacy of that natural order. Religious naturalism is philosophically materialistic, but affirms the sense of mystery that accompanies our contemplation of the emergence of matter (and especially life) from the Big Bang forward. Though largely informed by science for its cognitive understanding, it draws on traditional religious feeling for its artistic and emotional inspiration."

"Religious naturalism is the type of naturalism which affirms a set of beliefs and attitudes that there are religious aspects of this world which can be appreciated within a naturalistic framework. There are some events or process in our experience that elicit responses that can appropriately be called religious."

"“RN” [religious naturalism] is a philosophy which seeks to live a religious life without a Supreme Being that is superior in power and value to the natural world. It is the attempt to think about life and live a religious orientation without a God, soul or heaven. There is a slightly different use of the term which overlaps with this first one. In this second view RN is the attempt to find in the natural world (including culture and history) the world as scientifically understood inspiration and resources for their religious life."

"Religious Naturalism is the view that nature is metaphysically ultimate and that nature or some aspect of nature is religiously ultimate. There is nothing beyond, behind or below nature. Nature requires no explanation beyond itself. It always has existed and always will exist in some shape or form. Its constituents, principles, laws and relationships are the sole reality. This reality takes on new traits and possibilities as it evolves inexorably through time"

"Religious Naturalism is a spiritual and philosophical orientation arising from profound responses to the wonder and mystery of Nature and its emergent manifestations in human creativity and culture. Its views of Nature are embodied in the Epic of Evolution and informed by scientific inquiry, without reference to supernatural explanations. It emphasizes reverence and gratitude for Nature and a deep regard for all life; it recognizes the imperative of planetary sustainability. It supports efforts that honor ecological and cultural diversity, that promote social justice and free inquiry, and that create a more compassionate, rational world where humans and non-humans alike can thrive."

"Religious naturalism is many things. It is a life of contemplation, inquiry, and moral practice devoted to the beauty and creativity of nature. It is the belief that nature is the whole of reality and that this insight is religiously and morally significant. It is a form of life that takes nature as the context for the discernment of meaning, value, and what matters to us ultimately. It is a way of being religious that understands human culture and religiosity within the vast sweep of cosmic evolution. Its sacred text is an epic that arcs from the genesis of the Universe with the Big Bang and the swirling of the earliest cosmic elements, to the birth pangs of stars and planets and the constellation of galaxies; it includes everything from the Sun’s gestation of our solar system to the emergence of life on earth, from the stunning ubiquity of bacteria to the biospheric tipping point that our own species has precipitated. It is a humble religious path that decentralizes the human species within the infinitely broader metaphysical and aesthetic rhythms of the Universe. It is a way of knowing that reveres the wisdom of collective human experience and reason more highly than any single sacred book or tradition. It is a quest for wisdom from wherever it may come: from the symbols, myths and rituals of the world’s diverse religious traditions, from literature and the arts, from the intricate splendors of indigenous knowledges to the mind-bending ways of the modern sciences. For religious naturalism, there is no “outside” of revelation—the whole of the cosmos rings with it, from the subatomic to the interstellar, from the unicellular to the civilizational."

"The religious naturalism of my book, therefore, might more accurately be described as spiritual naturalism; I tell of our scientific understandings of who we are and how we got here, and I respond with such sensibilities as belonging, communion, gratitude, humility, assent, and awe."

"Religious naturalism is best thought of as a generic term for mindful religious approaches to our understanding of the natural world. As such, it does not represent a detailed system of religious beliefs. Instead, the specificity shifts to, and resides within, the religious naturalists themselves."

". . . we see an emerging consensus around a family-resemblance collection of features that religiously useful forms of naturalism tend to display. . . this emerging consensus is not on a single coherent doctrine, but rather on a list of propositions, most of which occur in a variety of combinations."

"With these caveats in mind, I assert that religiously useful naturalism affirms most of the following:"

"The cumulative affirmation here is that naturalism, understood in a particular way – namely, as affirming most of the propositions in the list above – can be religiously relevant and can define a life world for people drawn to it."

"What is religious naturalism? It is a philosophy, a theology, a way of life. It finds its meaning in the processes of nature – in all its immensity, all of its delicacy, all of its freedom, and all of its fate. It can be atheist or theist. But it does make a distinction between the natural and the supernatural."

"Before we can make any progress in a discussion of religious naturalism it will be necessary to clarify our terms. Many individuals – theists and non-theists alike – will balk at the word religious because they take it to imply conformity with institutionalized teachings and practices. And many naturalists balk at the word spiritual because they take it to imply belief in some supernatural being or metaphysical substance. I wish to be clear about rejecting both these usages in favor of a single definition that treats “religious” and “spiritual” as equivalent terms. I regard a religious or spiritual person to be one who takes ultimate concerns to heart. The important difference between religious (spiritual) persons and nonreligious (nonspiritual) persons is a matter of attitudes. Attitudes are valenced beliefs, that is, beliefs that are infused with appraisals of value and existential meaning, beliefs that have non-trivial consequences for the way a person relates to something or someone. The difference between a religious theist and a nominal theist is that the former takes God to heart. Likewise, a religious naturalist differs from a nonreligious naturalist by virtue of his or her suite of attitudes: the religious naturalist takes nature to heart."

"Dewey's religious naturalism is rooted in a criticism of Santayana's dualism."

"Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story—what we are calling religious naturalism—can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences."

"It is true that 'religious naturalism', or the acknowledgment of the Divine in Nature, is also an element of the Christian religion….but it is by no means the characteristic, the tendency of the Christian religion."

"Religious Naturalism differs from this (naturalism) mainly in the fact that it extends the domain of nature farther outwards into space and time. It never transcends nature"

"Religious naturalism is today one of the outstanding American philosophies of religion"

"Religious Naturalists will be known for their reverence and awe before Nature, their love for Nature and natural forms, their sympathy for all living things, their guilt for enlarging the ecological footprints, their pride in reducing them, their sense of gratitude directed towards the matrix of life, their contempt for those who abstract themselves from natural values, and their solidarity with those who link their self-esteem to sustainable living."

"(1) there exists a supernatural being(s) or power(s) outside the natural world, (2) this being or power has commerce with the world, and (3) the grounds for belief in both the supernatural being and its commerce cannot be seen, discovered or inferred by way of any known or reliable epistemic method. Note that this commitment to the dispensability of the supernatural does not contain a rejection of all forms of spirituality or religion. The theologians and philosophers who are Religious Naturalists reject the conjunctions of 1,2 and 3 above."

"One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished."

"There are two flavors of God people: those whose God is natural and those whose God is supernatural. Certainly there are a lot of people within religious naturalism who have no problem with God language--God as love, God as evolution, God as process. People see God as part of nature and give God-attributes to the part of nature that they find most sacred. I encounter people like that all the time."

"We try to make ourselves worthy of a universe of which we are an infinitesimal part. We will not agree on what worthiness consists of. For the religious naturalist, it is a mix of cautious skepticism and celebration"

"I'll describe religious naturalism as a theology, a religion, an ethics, and a spiritual transformation"

"epic of evolution"

"Ursula Goodenough"

"Religious Naturalism"

"Religious Naturalism Information"

"LibraryThing - Religious Naturalism"

"People are usually surprised to discover that I hate the phrase "constitutional rights." I hate the phrase because it is terribly misleading. Most of the people who say it or hear it have the impression that the Constitution "grants" them their rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. Strictly speaking it is the Bill of Rights that enumerates our rights, but none of our founding documents bestow anything on you at all [...] The government can burn the Constitution and shred the Bill of Rights, but those actions wouldn't have the slightest effect on the rights you've always had."

"'That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle."

"The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endowed him with the faculty of freewill. But every man, when he enters into society, gives up a part of his natural liberty, as the price of so valuable a purchase; and, in consideration of receiving the advantages of mutual commerce, obliges himself to conform to those laws, which the community has thought proper to establish."

"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights."

"A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never."

"The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasonings, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society."

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms...The phrase "the people" meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments — that is, each and every free person. A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved by the government as the only class entitled to the freedom of the press. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"I think that freedom means being able to do what you want without harming others... Freedom isn't something given by the government. I think it is a God-given right, and you are born with this right as a human being."

"One can conclude that certain essential, or fundamental, rights should exist in any just society. It does not follow that each of those essential rights is one that we as judges can enforce under the written Constitution. The Due Process Clause is not a guarantee of every right that should inhere in an ideal system. Many argue that a just society grants a right to engage in homosexual conduct. If that view is accepted, the Bowers decision in effect says the State of Georgia has the right to make a wrong decision—wrong in the sense that it violates some people's views of rights in a just society. We can extend that slightly to say that Georgia's right to be wrong in matters not specifically controlled by the Constitution is a necessary component of its own political processes. Its citizens have the political liberty to direct the governmental process to make decisions that might be wrong in the ideal sense, subject to correction in the ordinary political process."

"Your life brings you into a multiplicity of relationships with other people. Some of them love justice and righteousness; others do not seem to want to practice them-they do you a wrong. Your soul is not hardened to the suffering they inflict upon you in this way, but you search and examine yourself; you convince yourself that you are in the right, and you rest call and strong in this conviction. However much they outrage me they still will not be able to deprive me of this peace-that I know I am in the right and that I suffer wrong. In this view there is a satisfaction, a joy, that presumably every one of us has tasted, and when you continue to suffer wrong, you are built up by the thought that you are in the right. This point of view is so natural, so understandable, so frequently tested in life, and yet it is not with this that we want to calm doubt and to heal care but by deliberating upon the upbuilding that lies in the thought that we are always in the wrong. Can the opposite point of view have the same effect?"

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

"[On completely popular government:] Its superiority in reference to present well-being rests upon two principles, of as universal truth and applicability as any general propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs. The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded, when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them. The second is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it."

"‘Natural rights’...[is not] a true way of putting things—and certainly not the most useful and fertile way. Nature [is] simply the mastery of the strongest [and confers no rights on man]. Two savage tribes contend for a tract of land of wh[ich] they are in need for their subsistence: nature gave the right to this land to the tribe wh[ich] was strong enough to thrash the other. No right is worth a straw apart from the good that it brings: and all claims to rights must depend—not upon nature—but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. General utility, public expediency, the greatest happiness of the greatest number—these are the tests and standards of a right; not the dictate of nature."

"You Own Your Own Life... To lose your Life is to lose your Future, to lose your Liberty is to lose your Present …and to lose the product of your Life and Liberty is to lose that portion of your Past that produced it A product of you Life and Liberty is your Property"

"Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral. If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even the most overwhelming majority can never make it morally permissible). Opinions—even majority opinions—neither create truth nor alter facts. A lynch mob is democracy in action. So much for mob rule."

"CONFIDANT, CONFIDANTE, n. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B, confided by him to C."

"Whatever, in connection with my professional service, or not in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret."

"Let those who are friendly to you be many, <br"

"Science in the past (and partly in the present), was dominated by one-sided empiricism. Only a collection of data and experiments were considered as being ‘scientific’ in biology (and psychology); forgetting that a mere accumulation of data, although steadily piling up, does not make a science."

"When I observed that by the performance of certain actions, unwholesome factors increased and wholesome factors decreased, then that form of bodily action was to be avoided. And when I observed that by the performance of such actions unwholesome factors decreased and wholesome ones increased, then such bodily action was to be followed. ... The same applies to conduct of speech and the pursuit of goals."

"Empiricism and positivism share the common view that scientific knowledge should in some way be derived from the facts arrived at by observation."

"I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism."

"Many people think that the progress of the human race is based on experiences of an empirical, critical nature, but I say that true knowledge is to be had only through a philosophy of deduction. For it is intuition that improves the world, not just following a trodden path of thought. Intuition makes us look at unrelated facts and then think about them until they can all be brought under one law. To look for related facts means holding onto what one has instead of searching for new facts. Intuition is the father of new knowledge, while empiricism is nothing but an accumulation of old knowledge. Intuition, not intellect, is the 'open sesame' of yourself."

"[On Empiricism] It is evident, on the basis of our considerations, that this appearance of success cannot in the least be regarded as a sign of truth and correspondence with nature. Quite the contrary, suspicion arises that the absence of major difficulties is a result of the decrease of empirical content brought about by the elimination of alternatives, and of facts that can be discovered with their help. In other words, the suspicion arises that this alleged success is due to the fact that the theory, when extended beyond its starting point, was turned into rigid ideology. Such Ideology is "successful" not because it agrees so well with the facts; it is successful because no facts have been specified that could constitute a test, and because some such facts have been removed. Its "success" is entirely man-made. It was decided to stick to some ideas, come what may, and the result was, quite naturally, the survival of these ideas. If now the initial decision is forgotten, or made only implicitly, for example, if it becomes common law in physics, then the survival itself will seem to constitute independent support., it will reinforce the decision, or turn it into an explicate one, and in this way close the circle. This is how empirical "evidence" may be created by a procedure which quotes as its justification the very same evidence it has Produced."

"Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest an not hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for granted that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought. Praise of argument takes it for granted that the artifices of Reason give better results than the unchecked play of our emotions. Such assumptions may be perfectly plausible and even true. Still, one should occasionally put them to a test. Putting them to a test means that we stop using the methodology associated with them, start doing science in a different way and see what happens."

"Empiricism itself is only the means, a quicker and more effective technique, for achieving technology’s ultimate cultural goal: the building of the ideal in the real world. One of its own basic dictates is that a certain amount of material must be collected and arranged into categories before any decisive comparison, analysis, or discovery can be made. In this light centuries of empirical science have been little more than the building of foundations for the breakthroughs of our own time and the future. The amassing of information and understanding of the laws and mechanical processes of nature (‘pure research’) is but a means to a larger end: total understanding of Nature in order, ultimately, to achieve transcendence."

"Humean skepticism should be well distinguished from Greek skepticism. Hume’s assumes as basic the truth of the empirical, of feeling, of intuition, and from that base contests general determinations and laws—because they lack justification from sense perception. Ancient skepticism was so far from making feeling and intuition the principle of truth that, on the contrary, it turned first of all against the senses."

"The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science."

"No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest."

"Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism."

"The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is ‘metaphysical’ and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate."

"'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories."

"The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism."

"If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?"

"There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically — we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!"

"The radical empiricist onslaught... provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior."

"Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space."

"The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.""

"Empiricism and idealism alike are faced with a problem to which, so far, philosophy has found no satisfactory solution. This is the problem of showing how we have knowledge of other things than ourself and the operations of our own mind."

"Until the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, it might have seemed as if the older philosophical tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were being definitely overcome by the newer empirical method. The newer method, however, had never prevailed in German universities, and after 1792 it was held responsible for the horrors of the Revolution. Recanting revolutionaries such as Coleridge found in Kant an intellectual support for their opposition to French atheism. The Germans, in their resistance to the French, were glad to have a German philosophy to uphold them. Even the French, after the fall of Napoleon, were glad of any weapon against Jacobinism. All these factors favored Kant."

"The difference in method, here, may be characterized as follows: in Locke and Hume, a comparatively modest conclusion is drawn from a broad survey of facts, whereas in Leibniz, a vast edifice of deduction is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle. In Leibniz, if the principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure in unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins. In Locke and Hume, on the other contrary, the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers upward, not downward; consequently the equilibrium is stable, and a flaw here and there can be rectified without total disaster. This difference of method survived Kant's attempt to incorporate something of the empirical philosophy: from Descartes to Hegel on the one side, and from Locke to John Stuart Mill on the other, it remains unvarying."

"If an object does exist on the strength of consciousness, how does one arrive at the existence of consciousness? If the existence of consciousness is established on the strength of the existence of the object of which it is conscious, how does one arrive at the existence of the object? If they exist on the strength of each other's existence, neither of the two can exist."

"British historians are notoriously suspicious of philosophical reflections about the nature of their craft. The charge is no doubt exaggerated, but it is hard to deny that they have sometimes gloried in presenting themselves as straightforward empiricists for whom the proper task of the historian is simply to uncover the facts about the past and recount them as objectively as possible."

"Philosophy … lost its prestige to the extent that it lost its evident advantage in cleverness to "normal life." In the transition from archaic teachings of wisdom to philosophy based on argument, it itself was engulfed in the twilight of alienation from life. It had to accept that the independent cleverness theories of pragmatics, economics, strategy, and politics proved themselves to be its better, until, with its logical niceties, it became infantile and academic, and stood there as the Utopian idiot with its reminiscences about great ideals. Today philosophy is surrounded on all sides by maliciously clever empiricisms and realistic disciplines that "know better.""

"It is usually a good idea to bear in mind the distinction between philosophy and an empirical science such as psychology. I once received a valuable lesson in this. A very distinguished astronomer visited the Department of Philosophy in Princeton and gave us a lecture entitled “An Astronomer’s Philosophy.” We philosophers were delighted. And I in my enthusiasm offered to reciprocate by giving a lecture to the astronomers which was to be entitled “A Philosopher’s Astronomy.” But this proposal was received by the astronomers with marked coldness."

"It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite."

"Rave on, down through the industrial revolution Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age Rave on down through time and space down through the corridors Rave on words on printed page."

"The theory of empiricism is plausible because it assumes that accuracy about small matters prepares the way for valid judgment about large ones. What happens, however, is that the judgments are never made. The pedantic empiricist, buried in his little province of phenomena, imagines that fidelity to it exempts him from concern with larger aspects of reality."

"The whole tendency of empiricism and democracy in speech, dress and manners has been toward a plainness which is without symbolic significance. The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian"

"Science is not inevitable; this question is very fruitful indeed."

"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?"

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality&mdash;judiciously, as you will&mdash;we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.""

"You must remember, once more, that expectations are the blocks with which you build your reality. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles."

"The Ninth Rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical."

"It is the principle of antipathy which leads us to speak of offences as deserving punishment. It is the corresponding principle of sympathy which leads us to speak of certain actions as meriting reward. This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider."

"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."

"A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end."

"Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means."

"The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity."

"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age."

"He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end."

"Consequentialism says that consequences—"results," as a pragmatist might say—are the only things that ultimately matter. Here the word "ultimately" is very important. It's not that things other than consequences—things like being honest, for example—don't matter, but rather that other things matter, when they do, because of their consequences. According to consequentialism, our ultimate goal should be to make things go as well as possible."

"Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends."

"... had I taken the line, so often adopted by strong men in controversy, of justifying the means by the result."

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."

"I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations."

"As my poor d'Artagnan used to swear, the importance of the end justifies the meanness of the methods."

"An agent who regarded [sound moral principles] as mere rules of thumb would ignore them whenever she calculated that compliance wasn’t necessary to minimize the cumulative badness of suffering. The problem is that it might also be in her own interest to violate these principles, and self-interest could distort her calculations, even when she calculated sincerely. She could thus acquire a pattern of violating the principles even when compliance with them really was necessary to prevent the worst cumulative suffering. To avoid this, we would want her to feel strongly inhibited from violating the principles. Inhibitions of this kind can insulate agents from the effect of biased calculations."

"That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it."

"If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?"

"There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing."

"Exitus acta probat."

"Often it is means that justify ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble."

"A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified."

"This concept of "national defense" cannot be deemed an end in itself, justifying any exercise of legislative power designed to promote such a goal."

"Cause means"

":(a) in one sense, that as the result of whose presence something comes into being—e.g., the bronze of a statue and the silver of a cup, and the classes which contain these [i.e., the material cause];"

":(b) in another sense, the form or pattern; that is, the essential formula and the classes which contain it—e.g. the ratio 2:1 and number in general is the cause of the octave—and the parts of the formula [i.e., the formal cause]."

":(c) The source of the first beginning of change or rest; e.g. the man who plans is a cause, and the father is the cause of the child, and in general that which produces is the cause of that which is produced, and that which changes of that which is changed [i.e., the efficient cause]."

":(d) The same as "end"; i.e. the final cause; e.g., as the "end" of walking is health. For why does a man walk? "To be healthy," we say, and by saying this we consider that we have supplied the cause [the final cause]."

":(e) All those means towards the end which arise at the instigation of something else, as, e.g., fat-reducing, purging, drugs and instruments are causes of health; for they all have the end as their object, although they differ from each other as being some instruments, others actions [i.e., necessary conditions]."

"With ignorance as proximate cause, volitional formations come to be; with volitional formations as proximate cause, consciousness; with consciousness as proximate cause, name-and-form; with name-and-form as proximate cause, the six sense bases; with the six sense bases as proximate cause, contact; with contact as proximate cause, feeling; with feeling as proximate cause, craving; with craving as proximate cause, clinging; with clinging as proximate cause, existence; with existence as proximate cause, birth; with birth as proximate cause, suffering; with suffering as proximate cause, faith; with faith as proximate cause, gladness; with gladness as proximate cause, rapture; with rapture as proximate cause, tranquillity; with tranquillity as proximate cause, happiness; with happiness as proximate cause, concentration; with concentration as proximate cause, the knowledge and vision of things as they really are; with the knowledge and vision of things as they really are as proximate cause, revulsion; with revulsion as proximate cause, dispassion; with dispassion as proximate cause, liberation; with liberation as proximate cause, the knowledge of destruction."

"Causa latet: vis est notissima."

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas."

"Causation is defined by some modern philosophers as unconditional uniformity of succession, e.g., existence of fire follows from putting a lighted match to the fuel. This idea must be got rid of to understand force. All universally true laws of nature are laws of co-existence, not succession."

"Since therefore ‘tis possible for all objects to become causes or effects to each other, it may be proper to fix some general rules, by which we may know when they really are so."

":(1) The cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time."

":(2) The cause must be prior to the effect."

":(3) There must be a constant union betwixt the cause and effect. ‘Tis chiefly this quality, that constitutes the relation."

":(4) The same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause. This principle we derive from experience, and is the source of most of our philosophical reasonings. For when by any clear experiment we have discovered the causes or effects of any phaenomenon, we immediately extend our observation to every phenomenon of the same kind, without waiting for that constant repetition, from which the first idea of this relation is deriv’d."

":(5) There is another principle, which hangs upon this, viz. that where several different objects produce the same effect, it must be by means of some quality, which we discover to be common amongst them. For as like effects imply like causes, we must always ascribe the causation to the circumstance, wherein we discover the resemblance."

":(6) The following principle is founded on the same reason. The difference in the effects of two resembling objects must proceed from that particular, in which they differ. For as like causes always produce like effects, when in any instance we find our expectation to be disappointed, we must conclude that this irregularity proceeds from some difference in the causes."

":(7) When any object encreases or diminishes with the encrease or diminution of its cause, ‘tis to be regarded as a compounded effect, deriv’d from the union of the several different effects, which arise from the several different parts of the cause. The absence or presence of one part of the cause is here suppos’d to be always attended with the absence or presence of a proportionable part of the effect. This constant conjunction sufficiently proves, that the one part is the cause of the other. We must, however, beware not to draw such a conclusion from a few experiments. A certain degree of heat gives pleasure; if you diminish that heat, the pleasure diminishes; but it does not follow, that if you augment it beyond a certain degree, the pleasure will likewise augment; for we find that it degenerates into pain."

":(8) The eighth and last rule I shall take notice of is, that an object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without any effect, is not the sole cause of that effect, but requires to be assisted by some other principle, which may forward its influence and operation. For as like effects necessarily follow from like causes, and in a contiguous time and place, their separation for a moment shews, that these causes are not compleat ones."

"If reason (I mean abstract reason, derived from inquiries a priori) be not alike mute with regard to all questions concerning cause and effect, this sentence at least it will venture to pronounce, That a mental world, or universe of ideas, requires a cause as much, as does a material world, or universe of objects; and, if similar in its arrangement, must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject, which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an abstract view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attends the one supposition, which is not common to both of them."

"To all facts there are laws, The effect has its cause, and I mount to the cause."

"No suffering is self-caused. Nothing causes itself. If another is not self-made, How could suffering be caused by another? If suffering were caused by each, Suffering could be caused by both. Not caused by self or by other, How could suffering be uncaused?"

"Ask you what provocation I have had? The strong antipathy of good to bad."

"Your cause doth strike my heart."

"Find out the cause of this effect, Or rather say, the cause of this defect, For this effect defective comes by cause."

"God befriend us, as our cause is just!"

"Mine's not an idle cause."

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the "old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

"Principle of causality is fundamental to human thinking, and it has been observed experimentally that this assumption leads to complex hypothesis formation by human subjects attempting to solve comparatively simple problems involving a causal randomly generated events."

"The atoms in the philosophy of do not move merely by chance. Leucippus seems to have believed in complete determinism, since he is known to have said: "Naught happens for nothing, but everything from a ground and of necessity." The atomists did not give any reason for the original motion of the atoms, which just shows that they thought of a causal description of the atomic motion; causality can only explain later events by earlier events, but it can never explain the beginning."

"We do not know as a matter of actual observation how organic forms of energy originate. We do know, however, that such energy units exist, and that any life-processing unit exercises spontaneous influences over inorganic matter throughout its life span. These influences are in every sense vitalistic-type causes. Even inorganic matter may spontaneously generate causes of this same type. Radio-active metals, for instance, emenate energy particles regardless of the nature of the environment in which these emanations take place. Physical science, without doubt, is held accountable for a full description of these phenomena. At the same time, life-possessing units of matter, such as plants and animals, are constantly undergoing modification as a result of stimuli which impinge upon their organisms from the less complex material units of their environment. Simple, but intensely energized forces like wind or waves may destroy plant or animal organisms altogether ; or such forces may influence in conclusive manner the growth or movements of the more complex animal and plant organisms. In the case of inorganic matter, acids or single chemical elements vastly less complex in themselves than the radio active metals, may, attack and destroy the latter, or may hasten or retard the radio activity. These are mechanistic-type causes acting determinately upon energy units more complex than themselves."

"Probabilistic causality is a branch of philosophy that attempts to explicate causal relationships in terms of probabilistic relationships. This attempt is motivated by several ideas and expectations. First and foremost, probabilistic causality promises a solution to the centuries-old puzzle of causal discovery — that is, how humans discover genuine causal relationships from bare empirical observations, free of any causal preconceptions. ... Second, in contrast to deterministic accounts of causation, probabilistic causality offers substantial cognitive economy. ... Third, probabilistic causality is equipped to deal with the modern (i.e. quantum-theoretical) conception of uncertainty, according to which determinism is merely an epistemic fiction and nondeterminism is the fundamental feature of physical reality."

"What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in one's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness."

"He that will not when he may, When he will he shall have nay."

"Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal on the rock!"

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."

"Betwixt the devil and the deep sea."

"Be they wynners or loosers,…beggers should be no choosers."

"He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty."

"Imagine a captain of a ship the moment a shift of direction must be made; then he may be able to say: I can do either this or that. But if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead with its ordinary velocity, and thus there is but a single moment when it is inconsequential whether he does this or does that. So also with a person-if he forgets to take into account the velocity-there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him-or because he has lost himself."

"Every person, if he so wills, can become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing of his accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them. He ennobles them by choosing them."

"So much to win, so much to lose, No marvel that I fear to choose."

"Rather than be less Car'd not to be at all."

"Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell, * * * * * * And boldly venture to whatever place Farthest from pain?"

"When presented with options it's interesting to see what choices the people make."

"We must now take precautions to prevent you from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing with them, that man has not been created truly good simply because he is able to do evil. ... If you reconsider this matter carefully and force your mind to apply a more acute understanding to it, it will be revealed to you that man's status is better and higher for the very reason for which it is thought to be inferior: it is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory of the rational mind is based, it is in this that the whole honor of our nature consists, it is from this that its dignity is derived."

"Set honour in one eye and death i' the other, And I will look on both indifferently."

"Which of them shall I take? Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy'd, If both remain alive."

"I will not choose what many men desire, Because I will not jump with common spirits, And rank me with the barbarous multitudes."

"Preferment goes by letter and affection."

"There's small choice in rotten apples."

"[W]e now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history."

"When conflicted between two choices, take neither."

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."

"It is misleading to say that somebody "chose" a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. p. 142"

"A strange alternative * * * Must women have a doctor or a dance?"

"If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes."

"Of harmes two the less is for to chose."

"What voice did on my spirit fall, Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost? 'Tis better to have fought and lost Than never to have fought at all!"

"Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods."

"Devine, si tu peux, et choisis, si tu l'oses."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose."

"Inter sacrum et sazim."

"Se soumettre ou se démettre."

"Where passion leads or prudence points the way."

"But one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her."

"For many are called, but few are chosen."

"The difficulty in life is the choice."

"Or fight or fly, This choice is left ye, to resist or die."

"S'asseoir entre deux selles le cul a terre."

"Thy royal will be done—'tis just," Replied the wretch, and kissed the dust; "Since, my last moments to assuage, Your Majesty's humane decree Has deigned to leave the choice to me, I'll die, so please you, of old age."

"When to elect there is but one, 'Tis Hobson's Choice; take that or none."

"Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."

"Ἀλλ' ἐκδιδάσκει πάνθ' ὁ γηράσκων χρόνος."

"Love for the endlessness of labor is in itself an initiation of considerable degree; it prepares you for the conquest of time. Being in a condition where you have conquered time guarantees you a place in the Subtle World, where work is an unavoidable condition, just as it is in the body. A complaint about having to work can only come from a slave of the body."

"It's hard to watch something you love get swallowed, but don't we do the same with our time every day?"

"The sword of time will pierce our skins It doesn't hurt when it begins But as it works its way on in The pain grows stronger watch it grin. Suicide is painless It brings on many changes And I can take or leave them if I please."

"Time makes me stronger Well, there's nothing more to say."

"All things must in equity again decline into that whence they have their origin for they must give satisfaction and atonement for injustice each in the order of time."

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."

"Time went on, relentlessly, and one by one the proud works of man were lost."

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana."

"Time is not a reality [hupostasis], but a concept [noêma] or a measure [metron]…"

"Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love."

"That time either has no being at all, or is only scarcely and faintly, one might suspect from this: part of it has happened and is not, while the other part is going to be but is not yet, and it is out of these that the infinite, or any given, time is composed. But it would seem impossible for a thing composed of non-beings to have any share in being."

"Aristotle, Physics, as translated by Joe Sachs (Rutgers University Press: 2011), 217b30"

"Time is not composed of indivisible nows any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles."

"Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted."

"O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time."

"What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not."

"But if any excursive brain rove over the images of forepassed times, and wonder that Thou the God Almighty and All-creating and All-supporting, Maker of heaven and earth, didst for innumerable ages forbear from so great a work, before Thou Wouldest make it; let him awake and consider, that he wonders at false conceits. For whence could innumerable ages pass by, which Thou madest not, Thou the Author and Creator of all ages? or what times should there be, which were not made by Thee? or how should they pass by, if they never were? Seeing then Thou art the Creator of all times, if any time was before Thou madest heaven and earth, why say they that Thou didst forego working? For that very time didst Thou make, nor could times pass by, before Thou madest those times. But if before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it demanded, what Thou then didst? For there was no "then," when there was no time."

"God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints."

"With regard to authority, it is the greatest weakness to attribute infinite credit to particular authors, and to refuse his own prerogative to time, the author of all authors, and, therefore, of all authority. For truth is rightly named the daughter of time not of authority. It is not wonderful, therefore, if the bonds of antiquity, authority, and unanimity have so enchained the power of man, that he is unable (as if bewitched) to become familiar with things themselves."

"And he that will not apply New Remedies, must expect New Evils: for Time is the greatest Innovateur..."

"The spiritual man is not conscious of time, once he is separated from the physical body. Time is the sequential registration by the brain of states of awareness, and of progressive contacts with phenomena. There is no such thing as time on the inner planes, as humanity understands it. There are only cycles of activity or of non-activity."

"[T]he Quantity of motive Force cannot be known without Time... Time (...abstractedly) is the continuance of any Thing in its own Being. ...Time absolutely... is Quantity, as admitting... Equality, Inequality, and Proportion... [Y]ou may ask, whether Time was not before the World was created? And if Time does not flow in the Extramundane Space, where nothing is: A mere Vacuum? ..[S]ince there was Space before the World was created, and... there now is an Extramundane, infinite Space, (where God is present)... Time existed before the World began... Some Sun might have given Light long before; and at present this, or some other like it, may diffuse Light thro' Imaginary Spaces. Time therefore does not imply an actual Existence, but only the Capacity or Possibility of the Continuance of Existence; just as Space expresses the Capacity of a Magnitude contain'd in it. ...[D]oes not Time imply Motion? I answer no... any more than it does Rest. ...[W]hether Things move on, or stand still; whether we sleep or wake, Time flows perpetually with an equal Tenor."

"Time is... a Quantum in itself, tho' in Order to find the Quantity of it, we... call in Motion... as a Measure... and thus Time as measurable signifies Motion; for if all Things were to continue at Rest, it would be impossible to find out... how much Time has elaps'd... We perceive nothing, unless so far as we may be instigated by some Change affecting the Senses, or that our Souls are mov'd and excited by the internal Operation of the Mind. ...So that the Quantity of Time so far as we can observe; depends upon the Extension of Motion. ...It cannot be justly inferr'd... We do not perceive the Thing, therefore there is no such Thing, that is a false Illusion, a deceitful Dream, that wou'd cause us to join together two remote Instants of Time. But nevertheless this is very True... That is, for as much Motion as there was, so much Time seems to have been elapsed; nor, when we mention such a Quantity of Time, do we merely mean any Thing else, than the Performance of so much Motion, to the continued successive Extension of which we imagine the Permanency as Things is co-extended."

"I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage of action. Otherwise I’m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. … You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. … Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold on to my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action."

"In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. ... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time. ... From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play."

"Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make."

"YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments."

"Captain James T. Kirk: If change is inevitable, predictable, beneficial, doesn't logic demand that you be a part of it?"

"Mirror Spock: One man cannot summon the future."

"Captain James T. Kirk: But one man can change the present."

"I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep, And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow. I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!"

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

"Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment."

"Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty."

"Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different."

"Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."

"The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us."

"Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures."

"And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges."

"Legitimate manners owe their value to the fact that they manifest the rarest conditions of acquisition, that is, a social power over time which is tacitly recognized as the supreme excellence: to possess things from the past, i.e., accumulated, crystallized history, aristocratic names and titles, châteaux or ’stately homes’, paintings and collections, vintage wines and antique furniture, is to master time, through all those things whose common feature is that they can only be acquired in the course of time, by means of time, against time, that is, by inheritance or through dispositions which, like the taste for old things, are likewise only acquired with time and applied by those who can take their time."

"we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"They say time is the fire in which we burn. Right now, Captain, my time is running out. Because we leave so many things unfinished in our lives. And, by the way, I know you will understand."

"Die Zukunft wird nicht gemeistert von denen, die am Vergangenen kleben."

"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all Number One, we're only mortal."

"Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future."

"Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's."

"You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there."

"... time is the friend of the wonderful business — it's the enemy of the lousy business."

"If there is one thing that I have come to hate more than the gods, it is time."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"Yet Time, who changes all, had altered him In soul and aspect as in age; years steal Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb; And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim."

"When Youth and Pleasure meet To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet."

"O Time! the beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled— Time! the corrector where our judgments err, The test of truth, love, sole philosopher, For all besides are sophists, from thy thrift Which never loses though it doth defer— Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift."

"Spared and blessed by Time, Looking tranquility."

"Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, — and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?"

"The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules."

"Waiting for the time to pass you by; hope the winds of change will change your mind."

"How we remember the past determines the shape of the future."

"'I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.' 'Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle. 'No, no! The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: 'explanations take such a dreadful time.'"

"It's always tea time!"

"Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it."

"The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven, this also has its heavenly omens;—amid the bustling trivialities and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot read and obey, it will not be well with us!"

""The time has come", the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings"."

"Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time."

"A butterfly Fluttering over the vendor's Dry flowers of spring Only two days it flies Caught by the lost boy Yet still."

"Time ripens all things. No man is born wise."

"There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things."

"But all in good time."

"With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness."

"Time is still one of the great mysteries in physics, one that calls into question the very definition of what physics is."

"Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future."

"The more thorough the understanding needed, the further back in time one must go."

"In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to " redeem the time " which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning in this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright."

"Time,— that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities."

"The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings."

"Time was the enemy never to be conquered and there were no reserves to help stay the tide."

"Time is the enemy whose patience can’t be exhausted."

"What though the tide of years may roll."

"I am but as others: I am but what I was born to be." "Do you recognize what you were born to be? Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man — man, made in the image of God. How can you, how dare you, give the lie to your Creator?" "What has He given me? What have I to thank Him for?" "First, manhood; the manhood His Son disdained not to wear; worldly gifts, such as rank, riches, influence, things which others have to spend half an existence in earning; life in its best prime, with much of youth yet remaining — with grief endured, wisdom learnt, experience won. Would to Heaven, that by any poor word of mine I could make you feel all that you are — all that you might be!" A gleam, bright as a boy's hope, wild as a boy's daring, flashed from those listless eyes — then faded. "You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been. Now it is too late." "There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world — nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'"

"... on the confines of this world, or from the unknown shores of the next, the question meets them: "What have you done with Time?" —Time, the only mortal gift bestowed equally on every living soul, and, excepting the soul, the only mortal loss which is totally irretrievable."

"The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.""

"I do know what time is,” Tubby declared. He paused. “Time,” he added slowly—“time is what keeps everything from happening at once. I know that—I seen it in print, too.”"

"Time," I said, "Well, I read somewhere that time is what keeps everything from happening at once."

"Truth was the only daughter of Time."

"He is changing times and seasons, removing kings and setting up kings."

"Rose: I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be."

"Time is fleeting. See what it brings."

"The whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which is in no way dependent on any other; and, accordingly, because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist, unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were,—that is, conserve me."

"Time is the simplest thing, and the most precious, for it cannot be made."

"If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been."

"Time Prophet: Time begins and then time ends, and then time begins once again It is happening now, it has happened before, it will surely happen again."

"The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The order is rapidly fadin’ And the first one now will later be last For the times they are a-changin’."

"Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event."

"If you don't take my words too seriously, I would say this: If we assume that all matter would disappear from the world, then, before relativity, one believed that space and time would continue existing in an empty world. But, according to the theory of relativity, if matter and its motion disappeared there would no longer be any space or time."

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."

"Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable."

"Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present."

"Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. (II)"

"Time the destroyer is time the preserver, Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops, The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple. And the ragged rock in the restless waters, Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it; On a halcyon day it is merely a monument, In navigable weather it is always a seamark To lay a course by: but in the sombre season Or the sudden fury, is what it always was."

"You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here."

"Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, While the narrowing rails slide together behind you."

"Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind."

"A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments."

"Time is Life."

"Lots of things take time, and time was Momo's only form of wealth."

"All dwelling in one house are strange brothers three, as unlike as any three brothers could be, yet try as you may to tell brother from brother, you'll find that the trio resemble each other. The first isn't there, though he'll come beyond doubt. The second's departed, so he's not about. The third and the smallest is right on the spot, And manage without him the others could not. Yet the third factor with which to be reckoned Because the first brother turns into the second. You cannot stand back and observe number three, For one of the others is all you will see. So tell me, my child, are the three of them one? Or are there but two? Or could there be none? Just name them, and you will at once realize That each rules a kingdom of infinite size. They rule it together and are it as well. In that, they're alike, so where do they dwell?"

"If I had to give you more, it's only been a year Now I've got my foot through the door, and I ain't going nowhere It took a while to get me here, and I'm gonna take my time Don't fight that good shit in your ear, now let me blow ya mind"

"It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim."

"Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse."

"The best general means to insure the profitable employment of our time, is to accustom ourselves to living in continual dependence upon the Spirit of God and His law, receiving, every instant, whatever He is pleased to bestow; consulting Him in every emergency requiring instant action, and having recourse to Him in our weaker moments when virtue seems to fail."

"... the time it would take light (which moves at the fastest known speed) to cross the nucleus of hydrogen (the smallest known object) ... What about still smaller times? Does “time” exist on a still smaller scale? Does it make any sense to speak of smaller times if we cannot measure—or perhaps even think sensibly about—something which happens in a shorter time? Perhaps not. ..."

"Time is money."

"Lost Time is never found again."

"Dost thou love life? then do not squander time; for that is the stuff life is made of."

"Time had passed. It will, given half the chance."

"One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right."

"It is the future that creates his present. All is an interminable chain of longing."

"“You know what they say about time,” Jacob said idly. “It’s what happens even when nothing else does.”"

"Monday could not have arrived on a worse day. It could have been polite and waited until Tuesday or even Wednesday."

"Seize the time... Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."

"Mr. La Forge, time is one thing we do not have in abundance."

"Jean-Luc Picard: Seize today for we know nothing of tomorrow. Laris: Today is glorious. And none of our tomorrows are guaranteed."

"We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. And as steps forward go I would like to acknowledge your classmate the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy: Elnor. May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past."

"[T]ime has nothing to show because time won't give me time."

"Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that 'yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream."

"And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing."

"The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be."

"Goliath: If I didn't fear the damage you would do to the time stream, I'd gladly leave you here. David Xanatos: But you won't, because you didn't. Time travel's funny that way."

"Man hat immer Zeit genug, wenn man sie gut anwenden will."

"In October 1672 ... had sailed to the South American island of ... While there, he noticed that the he had brought... ran ever so slightly slower than it did in Paris. ...When he shortened the three-foot pendulum by just one twelfth of an inch, it corrected the error. ... Isaac Newton, he immediately guessed the cause. The island of Cayenne, situated almost on the Equator, was farther from the center of the Earth's gravitational pull... As the pendulum reached the top of its swing... the gravitational pull would be slightly less... Richer's discovery revealed that the Earth almost certainly bulged at the Equator... one of the first observational confirmations of Newton's theory of gravity. Meanwhile, for Buffon at least, it established that when the world formed, it was molten."

"It's his last book. He wrote in in 1881, the year before he died, and usually we expect that in old age, just before death, that a great scientist will write a pontificating philosophical treatise on the nature of reality. And Darwin... wrote a book on worms. ...He was interested in worms because they were... a metaphor for his larger world-view. The worms that slowly churn the topsoil of England... that work literally beneath our feet, that we never notice, that we think are insignificant because they're so small and lowly, are in fact producing the very soil that is the basis of agriculture. And therefore Darwin uses it as a metaphor for the importance of apparently tiny things when you extend them over long periods of time. And that's what evolution is, the extension of small change (to Darwin) over vast periods of time. So the worms become a metaphor for evolution and for the whole process of temporal change, a very fascinating book."

"Thirty days hath November, April, June, and September, February hath xxviii alone, And all the rest have xxxi."

"The thing about time is, there’s so much of it between so little."

"The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages."

"Time for us embraces a whole field of 'before and after', but Aristotle says: 'Before and after are involved in motion, but time is these so far as they are numbered' (Phys. 223a28). Elsewhere he defines time as 'the number of motion in respect of before and after', and he could seriously discuss the question whether there could be time without conscious and thinking beings; 'for if there could be no one to count, there could be nothing counted. ...If nothing can count but soul, and within soul mind, there cannot be time without soul, but only the substratum of time' (ibid. 219b2, 223a22)"

"We speak of a clock as an instrument for measuring time. In Plato and Aristotle's scheme of things, time (χρόνος) is itself a kind of clock. ...At one point Plato notes ...'men scarcely realize that the journeyings of these planets are time.' ...time is to be actually identified with the planetary motions."

"We may... go to our... statement from Aristotle's treatise on the Pythagoreans, that according to them the universe draws in from the Unlimited time and breath and the void. The cosmic nucleus starts from the unit-seed, which generates mathematically the number-series and physically the distinct forms of matter. ...it feeds on the Unlimited outside and imposes form or limit on it. Physically speaking this Unlimited is [potential or] unformed matter... mathematically it is extension not yet delimited by number or figure. ...As apeiron in the full sense, it was... duration without beginning, end, or internal division—not time, in Plutarch's words, but only the shapeless and unformed raw material of time... As soon... as it had been drawn or breathed in by the unit, or limiting principle, number is imposed on it and at once it is time in the proper sense. ...the Limit, that is the growing cosmos, breathed in... imposed form on sheer extension, and by developing the heavenly bodies to swing in regular, repetitive circular motion... it took in the raw material of time and turned it into time itself."

"Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace."

"The difficulties which so many have felt in the doctrine of Negative and Imaginary Quantities in Algebra forced themselves long ago on my attention... And while agreeing with those who had contended that negatives and imaginaries were not properly quantities at all, I still felt dissatisfied with any view which should not give to them, from the outset, a clear interpretation and meaning... It early appeared to me that these ends might be attained by our consenting to regard Algebra as being no mere Art, nor Language, nor primarily a Science of Quantity; but rather as the Science of Order in Progression. It was, however, a part of this conception, that the progression here spoken of was understood to be continuous and unidimensional: extending indefinitely forward and backward, but not in any lateral direction. And although the successive states of such a progression might (no doubt) be represented by points upon a line, yet I thought that their simple successiveness was better conceived by comparing them with moments of time, divested, however, of all reference to cause and effect; so that the "time" here considered might be said to be abstract, ideal, or pure, like that "space" which is the object of geometry. In this manner I was led, many years ago, to regard Algebra as the Science of Pure Time: and an Essay, containing my views respecting it as such, was published in 1835. ...[I]f the letters A and B were employed as dates, to denote any two moments of time, which might or might not be distinct, the case of the coincidence or identity of these two moments, or of equivalence of these two dates, was denoted by the equation,B = Awhich symbolic assertion was thus interpreted as not involving any original reference to quantity, nor as expressing the result of any comparison between two durations as measured. It corresponded to the conception of simultaneity or synchronism; or, in simpler words, it represented the thought of the present in time. Of all possible answers to the general question, "When," the simplest is the answer, "Now:" and it was the attitude of mind, assumed in the making of this answer, which (in the system here described) might be said to be originally symbolized by the equation above written."

"The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment."

"The life of this world is made up of three days: yesterday has gone with all that was done; tomorrow, you may never reach; but today is for you so do what you should do today."

"We wish to exhibit history and nature so that we may regard them before scientific elaboration, so that we may see both realities in their reality. This means that we wish to arrive at a horizon from which history and nature can be originally contrasted. This horizon must must itself be a field of constituents against which history and nature stand out in relief. Laying out this field is the task of the "prolegomena to a phenomenology of history and nature." We shall approach this task... by way of a history of the concept of time. ...both historical reality and natural reality are continuities that run their course in time... In natural science, especially in its basic science of physics, the measurement of time plays a fundamental role in defining its objects. The investigation of historical reality is completely incomprehensible without a chronology, an ordination of time. Viewed simply from the outside, history and nature are temporal. To the totality of temporal reality we tend to juxtapose the extratemporal constituents which, for example, are the topic of research in mathematics. In addition... we are familiar with supratemporal constituents in metaphysics or theology, understood as eternity. In a very schematic and crude way, time already announces itself as one 'index' for the differentiation and delimitation of domains of being as such. The concept of time discloses particulars about type and reality for such a demarcation of the universal realm of entities. It becomes, according to the particular stage of its development as a concept, a guide for the question of the being of entities and their potential regions. This occurs without an expressly fundamental consciousness of such a role, which is thus fulfilled in a correspondingly crude way, without bringing to the fore the possibilities which are implied in such an orientation. The concept of time is therefore... linked to the basic question of philosophy, if indeed this asks about the being of entities, the actuality of the actual, the reality of the real."

"The history of the concept of time is the history of the discovery of time and the history of its conceptual interpretation. ...it is the history of the question of the being of entities, the history of the attempts to uncover entities in their being, borne by the particular understanding of time, by the particular level of conceptual elaboration of the phenomenon of time. Hence, in the end, the history of the concept of time is more accurately the history of the decline and the history of the distortion of the basic question of scientific research into the being of entities. It is the history of the incapacity to pose the question of being in a radically new way and to work out its fundamentals anew—an incapacity which is grounded in the being of Dasein."

"Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like "existence" and "space and time". Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections. This is actually the fact when the concepts become part of a system of axioms and definitions which can be expressed consistently by a mathematical scheme. Such a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way... But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely."

"The way in which the convergent mathematical schemes did not fulfill the requirements of relativity and quantum theory was... interesting. ...[O]ne scheme ...interpreted in terms of actual events in space and time, led to a...time reversal... The physicists are convinced... that the processes... do not occur in nature... if... separated by measurable distance in space and time. ...If we assume that the laws of nature do contain a third universal constant... of the order of 10-13 cm, then... our usual concepts... apply only to regions in space and time that are large compared to the universal constant. We should... be prepared for phenomena of a qualitatively new character when we... approach regions... smaller than the nuclear radii. The phenomenon of time reversal... might therefore belong to these smallest regions."

"Time is a game played beautifully by children."

"Whan the sunne shinth make hay, whiche is to say, Take time whan time comth, lest time steale away."

"Old Tune, in whose banks we deposit our notes, Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats; He keeps all his customers still in arrears By lending them minutes and charging them years."

"...dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

"Quidquid sub terra est, in apricum proferet ætas; Defodiet condetque nitentia."

": Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor."

"Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost"

"The present is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future."

"So much has already been accomplished for the workingman that I have hope, and great hope, of the future. The hours of labor have been shortened, and materially shortened, in many countries. There was a time when men worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Now, generally, a day’s work is not longer than ten hours, and the tendency is to still further decrease the hours. By comparing long periods of time, we more clearly perceive the advance that has been made. In 1860, the average amount earned by the laboring men, workmen, mechanics, per year, was about two hundred and eighty-five dollars. It is now about five hundred dollars, and a dollar to-day will purchase more of the necessaries of life, more food, clothing and fuel, than it would in 1860. These facts are full of hope for the future."

"The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future."

"Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me... Time can tear down a building or destroy a woman's face Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste Time waits for no one, no favors has he"

"Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future."

"A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8)."

"[A] feature in the Valentinian account of creation is instructive regarding the much-debated question of the "" of the Gnostics. The world was created after the image of the invisible world of the by a carrying out unwittingly his mother's intention. His ignorance, however, was not complete, as is shown in the following...When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate the timeless nature of the upper Ogdoad (the original eight Aeons in the Pleroma), but could not express their immutable eternity, being as he was a fruit of defect, he embodied their eternity in the times, epochs, and great numbers of years, under the delusion that by the quantity of times he could represent their infinity. Thus truth escaped him and he followed the lie. Therefore his work shall pass away when the times are fulfilled. (Iren. I. 17. 2)This of course is a parady of the famous passage in the Timaeus (37 C ff.) where Plato describes the creation of time as "the moving image of eternity." The vast gulf that divides the spirit of this imitation will be evident to anyone who takes the trouble to compare the two passages."

"Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling."

"Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment."

"Law is one site to both “remember the future” and to insure that the future remembers. Perhaps by paying attention to how law serves memory we can gain new understandings of law’s crucial role in knitting together our past, present and future. Perhaps by attending to the contestation that inevitably accompanies efforts to materialize memory in law we can gain a better understanding of the ways that social conflict plays itself out on the terrain of remembrance."

"Times can blind us to certain truths."

"Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future."

"We celebrate the past to awaken the future."

"My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future."

"We must use time as a tool, not as a couch."

"In its [knowledge's] light, we must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, "In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon"."

"But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future."

"There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future."

"To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life."

"The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing"

"Without restlessness time does not really exist: it does not exist for the animal, which is completely devoid of restlessness; and the clock that tells the time cannot do so when the restlessness ceases. But when the restlessness, as in the case of the merely temporal expectancy oscillates between fulfillment and nonfulfillment in such a way that the movement becomes swifter in time because the vanishing of time, the fact that time is passing, accelerates the restlessness, then of course the fulfillment, it if does not come in time, cannot come at all-when this is the case, the expectancy corrodes. Finally the restlessness apparently passes away; alas, this is precisely when the sickness has taken the form of consumption."

"The misfortune of our age is precisely that it has become merely time by itself, temporality, which impatiently wants to hear nothing about eternity and subsequently, well-intentioned or furious, even wants to make the eternal utterly superfluous by means of a contrived imitation, which will never in all eternity succeed, because the more we think we are able to or harden our hearts to be able to dispense with the eternal, all the more do we stand basically in need of just that."

"The power of time is great. In time we may not perceive this, because time slyly steals from one a little at a time; perhaps we will really find this out for the first time in eternity, when we will once more, and in retrospect examine what we with the help of time and the forty hears have managed to pack up. Yes, time is a dangerous power. In time it is so easy to begin over again from the beginning and then forget where one left off. Therefore even when one begins to read a very big book and does not quite trust one’s memory, one puts marks in the book. Ah, but with regard to one’s whole life, how often a person forgets to put in marks in order to be able to take notice properly!"

"Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again."

"If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are."

"In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy."

"Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right."

"Time: a great engraver, or eraser."

"That is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his."

"Curious it is that every hour of our day is repeated from myriad chimes; and yet how rarely do we attend to the clock striking ! Alas ! how emblematic is this of the way in which we neglect the many signs of time ! How terrible, when we think of what time may achieve, is the manner in which we waste it! At the end of every man's life, at least three-quarters of the mighty element of which that life was composed will be found void—lost—nay, utterly forgotten ! And yet that time, laboured and husbanded, might have built palaces, gathered wealth, and, still greater, made an imperishable name."

"Time past on as lightly as he always steps over flowers, Brussels carpets, marble terraces, green turfs, or whatever simile may best express a path without an impediment."

"The history of a minute — why, it would give a bird's-eye view of every possible variety in human existence. Wonderful the many events that are happening together — life and death — joy and sorrow— the great and the mean — the common and the rare — good and evil — are all in the record of that brief segment of time."

"Time passed as time ever does when passed monotonously, that is, with a degree of rapidity which only astonishes us when it is recalled to mind by some chance circumstance. Time should he reckoned by events, not hours ; the heart is its truest time-piece, at least as concerns ourselves."

"This hour will pass — all passes, On this life's fleeting scene ; But still the future glasses All that the past has been."

"I do not wish here to discuss the question, intensely interesting though it be, as to whether time can be said really to exist, or whether it is but a limitation of this lower consciousness, and all that we call time — past, present and future alike — is 'but one eternal Now'; I wish only to show that when the ego is freed from physical trammels, either during sleep, trance or death, he appears to employ some transcendental measure of time which has nothing in common with our ordinary physiological one. A hundred stories might be told to prove this fact... It seems that in the Koran there is a wonderful narrative concerning a visit paid one morning by the prophet Mohammed to heaven, during which he saw many different regions there, had them all very fully explained to him, and also had numerous lengthy conferences with various angels; yet when he returned to his body, the bed from which he had risen was still warm, and he found that but a few seconds had passed — in fact, I believe the water had not yet all run out from a jug which he had accidentally overturned as he started on the expedition!"

"Look up here! It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure! You will encounter many hardships ahead... That is your fate. Don't feel discouraged, even during the toughest times!"

"The flow of time is always cruel... its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days..."

"It is something that grows over time... a true friendship. A feeling in the heart that becomes even stronger through time...The passion of friendship will soon blossom into a righteous power and through it, you'll know which way to go..."

"Time passes, people move...Like a river's flow, it never ends. A childish mind will turn to noble ambition...Young love will become deep affection... The clear water's surface reflects growth..."

"Perhaps the most important way the urban bourgeoisie spread its culture was the revolution it affected in the mental categories of medieval man. The most spectacular of these revolutions, without a doubt, was the one that concerned the concept of and measurement of time."

"As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is; that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together; without inquiring into their particular manner of existing. And when many things are seen together, one perceives that order of things among themselves."

"Suppose someone asks why God did not create everything a year sooner; and that the same person wants to infer from that that God did something for which He cannot possibly have had a reason why He did it thus rather than otherwise, we should reply that his inference would be true if time were something apart from temporal things, for it would be impossible that there should be reasons why things should have been applied to certain instants rather than to others, when their succession remained the same. But this itself proves that instants apart from things are nothing, and that they only consist in the successive order of things; and if this remains the same, the one of the two states (for instance that in which the creation was imagined to have occurred a year earlier) would be nowise different and could not be distinguished from the other which now exists."

"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"

"O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away."

"Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present."

"The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present."

"We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us..."

"O time, swift robber of all created things, how many kings, how many nations hast thou undone, and how many changes of states and of various events have happened since the wondrous forms of this fish perished here in this cavernous and winding recess. Now destroyed by time thou liest patiently in this confined space with bones stripped and bare; serving as a support and prop for the superimposed mountain."

"We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us."

"My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it."

"Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter."

"Time is a valuable thing Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings Watch it count down to the end of the day The clock ticks life away"

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

"There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality."

"I heard a million tales before I came to you One after the other said, "Time′s the only cure""

"The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty."

"Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry."

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;"

"Time exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after."

"The time is always right to do what’s right."

"The modern Father Time, like the classical Saturn, reflected the paradox that time both consumes and brings to fruition. During the sixteenth century, just when Time was being portrayed as the most malevolent of creatures... he was also developing the dualism of a quite different reputation as the father of Truth. Samuel Chew, in The Virtues Reconciled, has shown that from the eleventh century there developed an important allegory in which Truth and Justice, Peace and Mercy were widely represented as the daughters of God. Fritz Saxl, in his essay "Veritas Filia Temporas," had earlier demonstrated that Time too had a paternity to Truth, who, according to Democritus, lay at the bottom of a deep well. Despite the implied sacrilege in the conflicting claims to paternity, Time's claim held good; this was probably because it was so useful an allegory in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic."

"Il tempo si caccia innanzi ogni cosa, e può condurre seco bene come male, male come bene."

"The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy... They never went by that saying which you constantly hear from the wiseacres of our day, that time heals all things. They trusted rather their own character and prudence — knowing perfectly well that time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad."

"How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once we begin to watch it! Inexorable, passionless— though hope and fear may pray, " Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon," — the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded and clasping hands as they dance onwards. So they may be to some of us at some moments. So they may seem as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those that go, and that troop have no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded, the sunshine falls not upon the gray and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghost like through the gloom."

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

"Time is composed of time-atoms, i.e., of many parts, which on account of their short duration, cannot be divided. The Mutakallemim undoubtedly saw how Aristotle proved that time, space, and locomotion are of the same nature. ...They, therefore, knew that if time were continuous and divisible ad infinitum, their assumed atom of space would of necessity likewise be divisible. Similarly, if it were supposed that space were continuous... the time-element... could also be divided. This has been shown by Aristotle in... Acroasis [Aristotelis stagyritae acroases physicae]. ...An hour is, e.g., divided into sixty minutes, the second into sixty parts and so on; at last after ten or more successive divisions by sixty, time-elements are obtained which are not subjected to division, and in fact are indivisible."

"Time plays now on the quietest of flutes."

"Non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere ‘Vivam’: Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie."

"Look, I know that time is precious, but do you think you could give me a moment or two with Jack?"

"Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation."

"Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we have time?"

"He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair; nor to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary—not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work; nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his actions. Happy is the man who can recognise in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession. Thus ought Man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible; nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it."

"The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound."

"I pondered my personal goals, too. My life could have ended that day at the restaurant, but I’d been given more time to be with my children and continue building a legacy. In some ways, we are only what we leave behind... We have only so much time. We need to use it well."

"Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love."

"We are being sucked into the body of eternity."

"Day and night, Seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost Shall hold their course, till fire purge all things new."

"Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race: Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross."

"The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non linear subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey...stuff."

"The Doctor: Ook, sorry, I've got a bit of a complex life. Things don't always happen to me in quite the right order. Gets a bit confusing at times, especially at weddings. I'm rubbish at weddings, especially my own."

"As to Duration, I still think it is absolutely impossible to conceive it without something that exists, and continues to exist, i.e. to endure. But how it should be a property of the thing existing is to me inconceivable. One thing... is absolutely certain, viz. that if eternal Duration be a property of the Supreme Being, Duration limited must be a property of inferior beings; so that we have here some common property. I find you agree with Dr Clarke, in considering Time and Duration as the same. But this is an error that Dr Clarke has fallen into, by not being learned in the Ancient Metaphysics; for there he would have learned that time is only the measure of motion. It therefore could not exist, but with the material world; so that, if we could suppose nothing existing but the Supreme Mind, which is immoveable, there would in that case be Duration, or &alpha;&#943;&#974;&nu;,—as the Greek Philosophers call it—but not χρόνος, or Time. And the Doctor should not have rejected the common distinction, made by all Philosophers and Divines before him, betwixt Time and Eternity, without assigning better reasons than he has done."

"There are moments in our lives we fear to relive and others we long to repeat. While time cannot give us second chances, maybe people can."

"“I am already late, I fear. What time is it?” “Time? Why the present, of course.”"

"You fail to understand, my friend. We do not control time. If anything, it controls us. We simply measure it."

"Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies."

"Doctor Manhattan: There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."

"He who cannot find time to consult his Bible will one day find he has time to be sick; he who has no time to pray must find time to die; he who can find no time to reflect is most likely to find time to sin; he who cannot find time for repentance will find an eternity in which repentance will be of no avail; he who cannot find time to work for others may find an eternity in which to suffer for himself."

"There was once a time when the life of men resembled that of beasts. They dwelt in mountain caves and dark ravines, for as yet there was no roofed house nor broad city fortified with stone towers. Nor did the curved ploughs cleave the black clod, nurse of the grain, nor the busy iron tend the fruitful rows of bacchic vines, but earth was barren. In mutual slaughter they dined on food of flesh. But when time, begetter and nurturer of all things, wrought a change in mortal life—whether of the solicitude of Prometheus, or from necessity, or by long experience, offering nature itself as teacher—then was discovered holy Demeter's gift, the nourishment of cultivated grain, and the sweet fount of Bacchus. The earth, once barren, began to be ploughed by yoked oxen, towered cities arose, men built sheltering homes and turned their lives from savage ways to civilized. From this time they made it a law to bury the dead or give unburied bodies their portion of dust, leaving no visible reminder of their former impious feasts."

"There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runs time's deer is slain And lies where it has lain."

"Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men's minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. ...Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. ...Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human activities."

"The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age."

"The clock... is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. ...while human life has regularities of its own... time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. ...if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what Bergson calls duration—is cumulative in its effects. ...organic time moves only in one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to be born."

"One... characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as when he projected the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of time has made a difference, just as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a medieval chronicler mentions the King... it is sometimes difficult to find out whether he is talking about Caeser or Alexander the Great or his own monarch: each is equally near to him. ...the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art... in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different times are presented upon a single stage."

"Because of the separation of time and space, things could appear and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: the dropping of a ship below the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a demon down the chimney. There was no mystery about the past from which they had emerged, no speculation about the future toward which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it with something of the same mystery in which the coming and going of adults affect the experience of young children, whose first graphic efforts so much resemble in their organization the world of the medieval artist. In this symbolic world of space and time everything was either a mystery or a miracle."

"Time-saving... became an important part of labor-saving. And as time was accumulated and put by, it was reinvested, like money capital, in new forms of exploitation. From now on filling time and killing time became important considerations: the early paleotechnic employers even stole time from their workers by blowing the factory whistle... earlier in the morning, or moving the hands of the clock... during lunch... Time was a commodity in the sense that money had become a commodity. Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as heinous waste. The paleotechnic world did not heed Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply: it had no mind to sit on an old gray stone and dream its time away."

"Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own."

"Now if the laws of nature hold constant over time—if the rules and patterns of today are the same as those of yesterday and tomorrow—then a valid physical equation will depend only on elapsed time. ...Do we have a universe in which the rules of the game are fixed... or ...a universe in which they vary from moment to moment? ...Nobody knows for sure... On the largest scales, over unimaginably great intervals of space and time, the laws of nature do seem to show a sense of history. ...Newton's mechanical equations specify only differences in time, ascribing no absolute meaning to each instant. The same goes for Maxwell's electromagnetic equations. The same goes for Schrödinger's quantum mechanical equations. The same goes for Einstein's equations of relativity. The same goes for so many other equations that describe so much of the physical universe. For us, open-minded but nonetheless emphasizing this ahistorical aspect of nature, our clocks will tick and tock without any reference to any absolute starting point."

"Don't waste your time, or time will waste you."

"Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat."

"The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now."

"Hitherto I have laid down the definitions of such words as are less known, and explained the sense in which I would have them to be understood in the following discourse. I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known at all. Only I must observe, that the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which, it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. I. Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month or a year."

"I consider time as flowing or increasing by continual flux & other quantities as increasing continually in time & from ye fluxion of time I give the name of fluxions to the velocitys wth wch all other quantities increase. ...I expose time by any quantity flowing uniformly and represent its fluxion by an unit, & the fluxions of other quantities I represent by any other fit symbols... This Method is derived immediately from Nature her self."

"All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle."

"A foot of jade is of no value, an inch of time is to be prized."

"If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future."

"Tempus edax rerum"

"Labitur occulte fallitque volatilis aetas, et nihil est annis velocius."

"Nihil est toto, quod perstet, in orbe. Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago."

"Sic tempora verti cernimus atque illas adsumere robora gentes, concidere has."

"Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas."

"Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same."

"Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. He said, when you are pissed off at somebody, and you're angry at them, you just haven't given them enough time. Just give them a little more time — and they'll almost always impress you. And that really stuck with me. I think he's absolutely right on that one."

"Find the best in everybody. … you might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out."

"Being successful doesn’t make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful!"

"You don’t find time for important things, you make it."

"Everyone has Good and Bad Times. Find your creative/thinking time. Defend it ruthlessly, spend it alone, maybe at home. Find your dead time. Schedule meetings, phone calls, and mundane stuff during it."

"Turn money into time – especially important for people with kids."

"General Advice: Never break a promise, but re-negotiate them if need be. If you haven’t got time to do it right, you don’t have time to do it wrong. Recognize that most things are pass/fail. Feedback loops: ask in confidence."

"Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier."

"Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think.""

"The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have.""

"If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, "tell the truth." If I got three more words, I'd add: "All the time.""

"We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully — for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up. Because when he shows up, it’s too late to do all the things that you’re always gonna, kinda get around to."

"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

"Time is the wisest counselor of all."

"Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.'"

"Those spacious regions where our fancies roam, Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come, In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd, Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind; And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last The speed that spins the future and the past: And, sovereign of an undisputed throne, Awful eternity shall reign alone."

"The time will come when every change shall cease, This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace: No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze; Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now shall ever last."

"Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world's movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world."

"Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say."

"Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever."

"In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into."

"So when the universe was quickened with soul, God was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more like its type. And whereas the type is eternal and nought that is created can be eternal, he devised for it a moving image of abiding eternity, which we call time. And he made days and months and years, which are portions of time; and past and future are forms of time, though we wrongly attribute them also to eternity. For of eternal Being we ought not to say 'it was', 'it shall be', but 'it is' alone: and in like manner we are wrong in saying 'it is' of sensible things which become and perish; for these are ever fleeting and changing, having their existence in time."

"And when the father who begat it perceived the created image of the eternal gods, that it had motion and life, he rejoiced and was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more nearly like its pattern. Now whereas that is a living being eternally existent, even so he essayed to make this All the like to the best of his power. Now so it was that the nature of the ideal was eternal. But to bestow this attribute altogether upon a created thing was impossible; so he bethought him to make a moving image of eternity, and while he was ordering the universe he made of eternity that abides in unity an eternal image moving according to number, even that which we have named time. For whereas days and nights and months and years were not before the universe was created, he then devised the generation of them along with the fashioning of the universe. Now all these are portions of time, and was and shall be are forms of time that have come to be, although we wrongly ascribe them unawares to the eternal essence. For we say that it was and is and shall be, but in verity is alone belongs to it: and was and shall be it is meet should be applied only to Becoming which moves in time; for these are motions. But that which is ever changeless without motion must not become elder or younger in time, neither must it have become so in past nor be so in the future; nor has it to do with any attributes that Becoming attaches to the moving objects of sense: these have come into being as forms of time, which is the image of eternity and revolves according to number. Moreover we say that the become is the become, and the becoming is the becoming, and that which shall become is that which shall become, and not-being is not-being. In all this we speak incorrectly. But concerning these things the present were perchance not the right season to inquire particularly."

"Time then has come into being along with the universe, that being generated together, together they may be dissolved, should a dissolution of them ever come to pass; and it was made after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might be as like to it as was possible. For the pattern is existent for all eternity; but the copy has been and is and shall be throughout all time continually. So then this was the plan and intent of God for the generation of time; the sun and the moon and five other stars which have the name of planets have been created for defining and preserving the numbers of time. ...and a month is fulfilled when the moon, after completing her own orbit, overtakes the sun; a year, when the sun has completed his own course. But the courses of the others men have not taken into account, save a few out of many... they do not know that time arises from the wanderings of these, which are incalculable in multitude and marvellously intricate. None the less however can we observe that the perfect number of time fulfils the perfect year at the moment when the relative swiftnesses of all the eight revolutions accomplish their course together and reach their starting-point, being measured by the circle of the same and uniformly moving. In this way then and for these causes were created all such of the stars as wander through the heavens and turn about therein, in order that this universe may be most like to the perfect and ideal animal by its assimilation to the eternal being."

"May I discard the outer cover of time from the layers of poetry by immersing the poet in its entirety within me."

"I’ve climbed up here holding the hilt of time’s sword after driving it into my tender heart."

"May I not so much be lost as would have no time to look at myself ever."

"Years following years steal something ev'ry day. At last they steal us from ourselves away."

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category."

"Hours are golden links, God's token Reaching heaven; but one by one Take them, lest the chain be broken Ere the pilgrimage be done."

"All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality."

"It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe."

"Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions."

"Time, they say, heals every wound; but not, I think, love or hunger."

"(8) In the religion of Zoroaster it is revealed. Except Time, all other things are created. Time is the creator; and Time has no limit, neither top nor bottom. It has always been and shall be for evermore. No sensible person will say whence Time has come. In spite of all the grandeur that surround it, there was no one to call it creator; for it had not brought forth creation. (9) Then it created fire and water; and when it had brought them together, Ohrmazd came into existence, and simultaneously Time became Creator and Lord with regard to the creation it had brought forth. ...(12) Then did Ohrmazd begin . Whatever Ohrmazd did, he did it with the aid of Time; for all the excellence that Ohrmazd needed, had (already) been created."

"We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight."

"What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now."

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

"Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate."

"Einstein asked himself a question... how can the sun and the Earth "attract" each other without touching..? ...[H]e imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body in water displaces the water... This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of the bodies, causing them to "fall" toward one another. ...The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. ...If things fall, it is due to this slowing of time. ...Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. ...[H]ere on ...our planet, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run ...into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst... [T]ime passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head."

"You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm — we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish — ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame."

"The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious. Nevertheless there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."

"I think that the timelessness of mathematics has none of the sublimity that it once seemed to me to have, but consists merely in the fact that the pure mathematician is not talking about time. ...I think that we can ...mirror the world, like Leibniz's monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. ...to recognize such distortions ...Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the here and now, not with that large impersonality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher."

"New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws which in our father's times were best; And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present."

"The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning."

"Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn."

"Urbes constituit ætas: hora dissolvit: momento fit cinis: diu sylva."

": An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them. In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing."

"Contra primus itaque causas pugnare debemus; causa autem iracundiae opinio iniuriae est, cui non facile credendum est. Ne apertis quidem manifestisque statim accedendum; quaedam enim falsa ueri speciem ferunt. Dandum semper est tempus: ueritatem dies aperit."

"Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri."

": Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day."

"Seconds, minutes, hours, they crawl by on hands and knees."

"Time is the nurse and breeder of all good."

"Time's glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light."

"Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not be wasted: Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime Rot and consume themselves in little time."

"Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy vailèd lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust: Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity."

"The end crowns all, And that old common arbitrator, Time, Will one day end it."

"Let's take the instant by the forward top; For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time Steals ere we can effect them."

"And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, "It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags.""

"Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal."

"Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try."

"There's a time for all things."

"The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

"Time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop."

"See the minutes, how they run, How many make the hour full complete; How many hours bring about the day; How many days will finish up the year; How many years a mortal man may live."

"So many hours must I take my rest; So many hours must I contemplate."

"Minutes, hours, days, months, and years, Pass'd over to the end they were created, Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. Ah, what a life were this!"

"Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides; Who cover faults, at last shame them derides."

"If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not; Speak then to me."

"Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

"'Gainst the tooth of time And razure of oblivion."

"We should hold day with the Antipodes, If you would walk in absence of the sun."

"Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites."

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem short."

"Time's the king of men, He's both their parent, and he is their grave, And gives them what he will, not what they crave."

"O, call back yesterday, bid time return."

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, times, and hours."

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitudes; Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done."

"Time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles."

"Beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time."

"The whirligig of time brings in his revenges."

"Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within.""

"Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time."

"Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists..."

"Time, time, time, see what's become of me, While I looked around, For my possibilities; I was so hard to please. But look around, leaves are brown And the sky is a hazy shade of winter."

"Time's tide will smother you … and I will too."

"Time in its slow, illimitable course Brings all to light and buries all again; Strange things it brings to pass, the dreadest oath Is broken and the stubbornest will is bent."

"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all."

"Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day."

"Time eases all things."

"I used to think I had the answers to everything But now I know Life doesn't always Go my way, yeah Feels like I'm caught in the middle That's when I realize I'm not a girl Not yet a woman All I need is time A moment that is mine While I'm in between"

"Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?"

"It’s not until they tell you you’re going to die soon that you realize how short life is. Time is the most valuable thing in life because it never comes back."

"I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself."

"Come, sir, is time really so precious? Mine isn't. If yours is, all the more tempting to steal a little."

"The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens. ... In this saga, time is transcended within the events of a single day&mdash;today&mdash;so that all that is past, from the first day, is consummated and is anticipated; so that today is esteemed in its real dignity, as if it were the first day, as if it were the last day, as if it were the only day, as if today and eternity were one."

"While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time."

"If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is&mdash;then and there&mdash;a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified."

"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."

"Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness."

"Is it so bad to pause the future to appreciate the past? [...] Is it so bad to shut the door and just accept we can't go back?"

"For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls."

"Since usurers sell nothing but the hope of money, that is time, they sell the day and the night. But the day is the time of light, and the night is the time of rest; therefore, they sell light and rest. It would not be right, therefore, for them to enjoy eternal light and rest."

"Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which, if thou procrastinatest, thou losest, which loss is lost forever."

"Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus."

"The future has taken root in the present."

"Συνεχές τε … πολυτελὲς ἀνάλωμα εἶναι τὸν χρόνον."

"The Unseasonable man is one who will go up to a busy person, and open his heart to him. He will serenade his mistress when she has a fever. He will address himself to a man who has been cast in a surety-suit, and request him to become his security. He will come to give evidence when the trial is over."

"We all have our time machines, don't we? Those that take us back are memories. Those that carry us forward are dreams."

"Psychological time does not conform to Einstein's physical time. If... my future can be my friend's past, and if my neighbor's past can be my present, then the past cannot be completed and the future is not yet to be made. Past and future must coexist with the present. Like a landscape extending as far as the eye can see, physical time exists in its entirety at once. The canvas of time stretches from the horizon of the past to the horizon of the future. All distinction between past, present and future is but an illusion. ...physical time neither flows nor passes. It exists as a single entity; it simply is."

"This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel, Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down."

"All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

"To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the resent moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. But without a sense of time, how would we function in this world? There would be no goals to strive toward anymore. I wouldn't even know who I am, because my past makes me who I am today. I think time is something very precious, and we need to learn to use it wisely rather than waste it. p. 36"

"Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being. p. 36"

"The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.... In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness... The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. p. 37"

"The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness... Ch. 5"

"Time is what the ego lives on. The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and you sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the timebound state of consciousness. p. 123"

"I recently met some old friends, a family I had not seen in a long time, and I was shocked when I saw them. I almost asked, “Are you ill? What happened? Who did this to you?” The mother, who walked with a cane, seemed to have shrunk in size, her face shriveled like an old apple. The daughter , who had been full of energy, enthusiasm, and the expectations of youth when I last saw her, seemed worn out, tired after bringing up three children. Then I remembered: Almost thirty years had passed since we last met. Time had done this to them. p. 125"

"Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time – a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago – yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is. p. 125"

"Time, that is to say, past and future, is what the false mindmade self, the ego, lives on, and time is in your mind. It isn't something that has an objective existence “out there.” It is a mind structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself. Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. p. 126"

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait."

"The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience."

"“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge."

"You'll never know How I watched you from the shadows as a child You'll never know How it feels to be the one who's left behind You'll never know the days, the nights The tears, the tears I've cried But now my time has come And time, time is not on your side [...] How I watched you from the shadows as a child You'll never know How it feels to get so close And be denied It's a gold and honey trap I've got for you tonight Revenge, it's a kiss, this time I won't miss Now I've got you in my sight With a Golden eye"

"When your legs get weaker time starts running faster."

"You've got to get yourself together You've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it. Don't say that later will be better now, You're stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it. [...] It's just a moment, this time will pass."

"Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus."

"Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque."

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

"Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.""

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

"What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail [...]."

"Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."

"Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, act in the living present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!"

"Time has two aspects. For civil and some scientific purposes, we want to know the time of day so that we can order events in sequence. In much scientific work, we want to know how long an event lasts. Thus, any time standard must be able to answer two questions: “When did it happen?” and “What is its duration?”"

"Killing time has never been one of my defter abilities, due, I believe, to my rather keen awareness that it is actually time that kills us."

"Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing."

"If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?"

"There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it."

"Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. ... Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end."

"Time is not a primary category, and the asymmetry of time between past and future is not a primary category in the description of nature. It is secondary and derived."

"The point is that in the past the time-span of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions. To-day the time-span is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions."

"... throughout mathematics, in one sense, transition does not enter. The interconnections are displayed in their timeless eternity. It is true that the notions of time, and of approach, and of approximation, occur in mathematical discourse. But as used in the science, the timefulness of time and the motion of approach are abstracted from."

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all."

"It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present. Moreover, the development of rational thought actually seems to have impeded man's appreciation for the significance of time. ...Belief that the ultimate reality is timeless is deeply rooted in human thinking, and the origin of rational investigation of the world was the search for permanent factors that lie behind the ever-changing pattern of events."

"Throughout Iranian thought there was a tendency to dualism... two distinct forms or aspects of time were recognized: indivisible time, that is the eternal 'now', and time that is divisible into successive parts. The former represented the creative aspect of time and was fundamental. It was called Zurvan akarana, or infinite time, and was the progenitor of the universe and of the spirits of good and evil. Associated with the universe was the other form of time called Zurvan daregho-chvadhata, that is the time of long dominion, or finite time. This was the time that brought decay and death. It dominated the world of man and was represented by the celestial firmament. ...The whole reason for the existence of finite time appears to have been to bring about that conflict of good and evil which eventually leads to the triumph of the former. ...Finite time begins and ends with the rule of Ohrmazd. At a given moment finite time came into existence out of infinite time. It goes through a cycle of changes until it finally returns to its original state and then merges into infinite time."

"The continuing evolution of our idea of time is revealed by the increasing importance of tense in the development of language. Greater knowledge of the universe has been accompanied by greater appreciation of the distinction between past, present, and future as people have learned to transcend the limitations of 'the eternal present'. Although our awareness of time is based on psychological factors and on physiological processes below the level of consciousness, ...it is also dependent on social and cultural influences. Because of these, there is a reciprocal relation between time and history. For, just as our idea of history is based on that of time, so time as we conceive it is a consequence of our history."

"The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration."

"The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it."

"Time is a waste of money."

"'Tis in Philosophy, and that is made up of nothing else; but receives addition from every days experiment. True indeed, for Divinity we have an infallible rule that do's plainly inform us of all necessary Truths; and therefore the Primitive Times are of greater Authority, because they were nearer to those holy Men who were the Pen-Men of Scripture. But now for Philosophy, there is no such reason: What ever the School Men may talk; yet Aristotles works are not necessarily true, and he himself hath by sufficient Arguments proved himself to be liable unto errour. Now in this case, if we should speak properly, Antiquity do's consist in the old age of the World, not in the youth of it. In such Learning as may be increased by fresh experiments and new discoveries: 'Tis we are the Fathers, and of more Authority than former Ages; because we have the advantage of more time than they had, and Truth (we say) is the Daughter of Time."

"Time is the inexorable process of doing computation."

"Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today."

"Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past."

"The future: a dark, desolate world. A world of war, suffering, loss on both sides. Mutants, and the humans who dared to help them, fighting an enemy we cannot defeat. Are we destined down this path, destined to destroy ourselves like so many species before us? Or can we evolve fast enough to change ourselves... change our fate? Is the future truly set? ... The past: a new and uncertain world. A world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate: each choice, each moment, a moment in the ripple of time. Enough ripple, and you change the tide... for the future is never truly set."

"“I can talk about time.” Mr. Rabbit took the watch from his waistcoat pocket again, and regarded its slow, jewelled face curiously. “So fragile, and yet the only unstoppable thing in this or any universe. Time.” He tapped the gently curved glass with his paw. “One second is such a tiny measure in the grand scheme of things. Yet one second can change so much. It is the difference between late and not late, between yesterday and today, and between here and gone.”"

"Nought treads so silent as the foot of Time; Hence we mistake our autumn for our prime."

"The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss: to give it then a tongue Is wise in man."

"Procrastination is the thief of time: Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene."

"Time is eternity; Pregnant with all eternity can give; Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile. Who murders Time, he crushes in the birth A power ethereal, only not adorn'd."

"Time wasted is existence, used is life."

"We push time from us, and we wish him back; * * * * * * Life we think long and short; death seek and shun."

"In leaves, more durable than leaves of brass, Writes our whole history."

"We see time's furrows on another's brow, * * * * * How few themselves in that just mirror see!"

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

"Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this."

"For the vision is yet for its appointed time, And it is rushing toward its end, and it will not lie. Even if it should delay, keep in expectation of it! For it will without fail come true. It will not be late!"

"My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle."

"From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

"The signs of the times."

"Brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; 30 those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; 31 those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away."

"I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation."

"A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

"We spend our years as a tale that is told."

"There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven — A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace."

"Ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death; considering him a friend, they pined away, and they made a covenant with him, because they are fit to belong to his party. For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, "Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and is overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up and no one turns back." Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them."

"It would certainly be a very great mistake to suppose that this Court does not attend to lapse of time."

"This I take notice of, only to shew an uncertainty as to time."

"The time makes no difference in the reason of the thing."

"Examining by hours is not so unprecedented. It was the old custom among the Romans to examine by the hour-glass."

"As for myself, whenever I sit upon the Bench (which is much oftener than I appear at the Bar), I always give the advocates as much water as they require; for I look upon it as the height of presumption to pretend to guess before a cause is heard what time it will require, as to set limits to an affair before one is acquainted with its extent, especially as the first and most sacred duty of a Judge is patience, which, indeed, is itself a very considerable part of justice. But the advocate will say many things that are useless. Granted. Yet is it not better to hear too much than not to hear enough? Besides, how can you know that the things are useless till you have heard them?"

"Six years—six little years—six drops of time."

"Modo, et modo, non habebent modum."

": By-and-by has no end."

"Backward, flow backward, O full tide of years! I am so weary of toil and of tears, Toil without recompense—tears all in vain, Take them and give me my childhood again. I have grown weary of dust and decay, Weary of flinging my heart's wealth away— Weary of sowing for others to reap; Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep."

"Backward, turn backward, then time in your flight; Make me a child again just for tonight. Mother, come back from the echoeless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore."

"Why slander we the times? What crimes Have days and years, that we Thus charge them with iniquity? If we would rightly scan, It's not the times are bad, but man."

"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."

"Le temps fuit, et nous traîne avec soi: Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi."

": Time flies and draws us with it. The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me."

"What's not destroyed by Time's devouring hand?"

"Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it."

"Time was made for slaves."

"Behind, he hears Time's iron gates close faintly, He is now far from them; For he has reached the city of the saintly, The New Jerusalem."

"Some wee short hour ayont the twal."

"Nae man can tether time or tide."

"How slowly time creeps till my Phœbe returns! While amidst the soft zephyr's cool breezes I burn. Methinks if I knew whereabouts he would tread, I could breathe on his wings and 'twould melt down the lead. Fly swifter, ye minutes, bring hither my dear, And rest so much longer for 't when she is here."

"The good old times—all times when old are good— Are gone."

"Thinkst thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs; mine Have made my days and nights imperishable, Endless, and all alike."

"Out upon Time! it will leave no more Of the things to come than the things before! Out upon Time! who forever will leave But enough of the past for the future to grieve."

"He more we live, more brief appear Our life's succeeding stages; A day to childhood seems a year, And years like passing ages."

"Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; To every day we live, a day we die."

"That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it."

"No ay memoria à quien el tiempo no acabe, ni dolor que nuerte no le consuma. There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not put an end to."

"I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves."

"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day."

"Opinionum enim commenta delet dies; naturæ judicia confirmat."

": Time destroys the groundless conceits of men; it confirms decisions founded on reality."

"O tempora! O mores!"

": O what times (are these)! what morals!"

"No! no arresting the vast wheel of time, That round and round still turns with onward might, Stern, dragging thousands to the dreaded night Of an unknown hereafter."

"Hours are Time's shafts, and one comes winged with death."

"Sex horas somno, totidem des legibus æquis Quatuor orabis, des epulisque duas; Quod superest ultra sacris largire Camœnis."

": Six hours in sleep, in law's grave study six, Four spend in prayer, the rest on nature fix."

"Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of."

"Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide adown thy stream Gently,—as we sometimes glide Through a quiet dream!"

"Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise, He who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river's bank expecting stay, Till the whole stream, which stopped him, should be gone, That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on."

"Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal Now does always last."

"His time's forever, everywhere his place."

"Time, as he passes us, has a dove's wing, Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound."

"See Time has touched me gently in his race, And left no odious furrows in my face."

"Swift speedy Time, feathered with flying hours, Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow."

"Che'l perder tempo a chi più sa più spiace."

": The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time."

"Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!… his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes."

"But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life."

"Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling."

"When Time shall turne those Amber Lockes to Gray."

"Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today."

"(Time) with his silent sickle."

"And write whatever Time shall bring to pass With pens of adamant on plates of brass."

"Who well lives, long lives: for this age of ours Should not be numbered by years, daies and hours."

"Let us leave hurry to slaves."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday."

"Dilatio damnum habet, mora periculum."

": Procrastination brings loss, delay danger."

"The four eights, that ideal of operative felicity, are here (New Zealand) a realized fact."

"I count my time by times that I meet thee; These are my yesterdays, my morrows, noons, And nights, these are my old moons and my new moons. Slow fly the hours, fast the hours flee, If thou art far from or art near to me: If thou art far, the bird's tunes are no tunes; If thou art near, the wintry days are Junes."

"So schaff' ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit."

": Thus at Time's humming loom I ply."

"Ein stiller Geist ist Jahre lang geschäftig; Die Zeit nur macht die feine Gährung kräftig."

": Long is the calm brain active in creation; Time only strengthens the fine fermentation."

"Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit; Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit."

": My inheritance, how wide and fair Time is my estate; to Time I'm heir."

"Die Zeit ist selbst ein Element."

": Time is itself an element."

"Rich with the spoils of time."

"I made a posy while the day ran by; Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band. But time did beckon to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away, * And wither'd in my hand."

"Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old."

"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying, And this same flower that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying."

"But what says the Greek? "In the morning of life, work; in the midday, give counsel; in the evening, pray.""

"Dum loquimur, fugerit invida Ætas: carpe diem."

": While we are speaking envious time will have fled. Seize the present day."

"Carpe diem, quam minime credula postero."

": Enjoy the present day, trusting very little to the morrow."

"Eheu fugaces Postume, Postume, Labuntur anni, nec pietas moram Rugis et instanti senectæ Afferet, indomitæ que morti."

": Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us: Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles, Nor the indomitable hand of Death."

"Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?"

": What does not destructive time destroy?"

"Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes."

": Each passing year robs us of some possession."

"Horæ Memento cita mors venit, aut victoria læta."

": In the hour's short space comes swift death, or joyful victory."

"How short our happy days appear! How long the sorrowful!"

"To the true teacher, time's hour-glass should still run gold-dust."

"And panting Time toil'd after him in vain."

"Seven hours to law, to soothing slumber seven, Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven."

"That old bald cheater, Time."

"The noiseless foot of Tune steals swiftly by And ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh."

"Time, that aged nurse Rocked me to patience."

"Time's waters will not ebb nor stay."

"Memento semper finis, et quia perditum non redit tempus."

": Remember always your end, and that lost time does not return."

"Time, which strengthens Friendship, weakens Love."

"Vingt siècles descendus dans l'éternelle nuit. Y sont sans mouvement, sans lumière et sans bruit."

"Twenty ages sunk in eternal night. They are without movement, without light, and without noise."

"Potius sero quam nunquam."

": Better late than never."

"Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations."

"Time is the Life of the Soul."

"Alas! it is not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of human passion with, from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number."

"A handful of red sand from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought."

"What we want, we have for our pains The promise that if we but wait Till the want has burned out of our brains, Every means shall be present to state; While we send for the napkin the soup gets cold, While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old, When we've matched our buttons the pattern is sold, And everything comes too late—too late."

"Volat hora per orbem."

": The hours fly around in a circle."

"Æquo stat fœdare tempus."

": Time stands with impartial law."

"But at my back I always hear Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near."

"Such phantom blossoms palely shining Over the lifeless boughs of Time."

"Time is a feathered thing, And, whilst I praise The sparkling of thy looks, and call them rays, Takes wing, Leaving behind him as he flies An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes."

"However we pass Time, he passes still, Passing away whatever the pastime, And, whether we use him well or ill, Some day he gives us the slip for the last time."

"Who can undo What time hath done? Who can win back the wind? Reckon lost music from a broken lute? Renew the redness of a last year's rose? Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?"

"When time is flown, how it fled It is better neither to ask nor tell, Leave the dead moments to bury their dead."

"Time, eftsoon will tumble All of us together like leaves in a gust, Humbled indeed down into the dust."

"Time will run back and fetch the age of gold."

"Le temps … souverain médecin de nos passions."

": Time is the sovereign physician of our passions."

"Time softly there Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods."

"A wonderful stream is the river of Time As it runs through the realms of tears, With a faultless rhythm and musical rhyme, And a broader sweep and a surge sublime, And blends with the ocean of years."

"Time, still as he flies, adds increase to her truth, And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth."

"For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth."

"Labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas, Ut celer admissis labitur amnis aquis."

": Time steals on and escapes us, like the swift river that glides on with rapid stream."

"Dum loquor hora fugit."

": While I am speaking the hour flies."

"Tempore difficiles veniunt ad aratra juvenci; Tempore lenta pati frena docentur equi."

": In time the unmanageable young oxen come to the plough; in time the horses are taught to endure the restraining bit."

"Nec, quæ præteriit, iterum revocabitur unda: Nec, quæ præteriit, hora redire potest."

": Neither will the wave which has passed be called back; nor can the hour which has gone by return."

"Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus, Et certam præsens vix habet hora fidem."

": Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next."

"Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis; Et fugiunt fræno non remorante dies."

": Time glides by, and we grow old with the silent years; and the days flee away with no restraining curb."

"Assiduo labuntur tempora motu, Non secus ad flumen. Neque enim consistere flumen. Nec levis hora potest."

": Time glides by with constant movement, not unlike a stream. For neither can a stream stay its course, nor can the fleeting hour."

"Tempus edax rerum."

": Time that devours all things."

"Temporis ars medicina fere est."

": Time is generally the best medicine."

"These are the times that try men's souls."

"Let time that makes you homely, make you sage."

"Time, the foe of man's dominion, Wheels around in ceaseless flight, Scattering from his hoary pinion Shades of everlasting night."

"The present is our own; but while we speak, We cease from its possession, and resign The stage we tread on, to another race, As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves."

"Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works Must yield at length to Time."

"Time is lord of thee: Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his."

"His golden locks Time hath to silver turned, O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing! His youth 'gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain! Youth waneth by increasing."

"Seize time by the forelock."

"Tanto brevius omne, quanto felicius tempus."

": The happier the time, the quicker it passes."

"From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime Out of Space—out of Time."

"Time conquers all, and we must time obey."

"Gone! gone forever!—like a rushing wave Another year has burst upon the shore Of earthly being—and its last low tones, Wandering in broken accents in the air, Are dying to an echo."

"Expect, but fear not, Death: Death cannot kill, Till Time (that first must seal his patent) will. Would'st thou live long? keep Time in high esteem: Whom gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem."

"Dum deliberamus quando incipiendum sit, incipiere jam serum est."

": Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it."

"He briskly and cheerfully asked him how a man should kill time."

"E'en such is time! which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have; And pays us naught but age and dust, Which, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days. And from which grave, and earth, and dust, The Lord will raise me up, I trust."

"Hour after hour departs, Recklessly flying; The golden time of our hearts Is fast a-dying: O, how soon it will have faded! Joy droops, with forehead shaded; And Memory starts."

"Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane!"

"By many a temple half as old as Time."

"To vanish in the chinks that Time has made."

"Que pour les malheureux l'heure lentement fuit!"

": How slowly the hours pass to the unhappy."

"Tag wird es auf die dickste Nacht, und, kommt Die Zeit, so reifen auch die spät'sten Früchte."

": Day follows on the murkiest night, and, when the time comes, the latest fruits will ripen."

"O, wer weiss Was in der Zeiten Hintergrunde schlummert."

": Who knows what may be slumbering in the background of time!"

"Time flies on restless pinions—constant never. Be constant—and thou chainest time forever."

"Spät kommt ihr—doch ihr kommt!"

": You come late, yet you come!"

"Dreifach ist der Schritt der Zeit: Zögernd kommt die Zukunft hergezogen, Pfeilschnell ist das Jetzt entflogen, Ewig still steht die Vergangenheit."

": Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last: Loitering slow, the Future creepeth— Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth— And motionless forever stands the Past."

"Doch zittre vor der langsamen, Der stillen Macht der Zeit."

": Yet tremble at the slow, silent power of time."

"Upon my lips the breath of song, Within my heart a rhyme, Howe'er time trips or lags along, I keep abreast with time!"

"Time rolls his ceaseless course."

"Infinita est velocitas temporis quæ magis apparet respicientibus. The swiftness of time is infinite, which is still more evident to those who look back upon the past."

"Volat ambiguis Mobilis alis hora."

": The swift hour flies on double wings."

"Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis."

": No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors."

"Yet, do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young."

"Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty's brow."

"O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?"

"The flood of time is rolling on; We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream. Have ye done well?"

"Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?"

"Per varios præceps casus rota volvitur ævi."

"For time would, with us, 'stead of sand, Put filings of steel in his glass, To dry up the blots of his hand, And spangle life's page as they pass. Since all flesh is grass ere 'tis hay, O may I in clover lie snug, And when old Time mow me away, Be stacked with defunct Lady Mugg!"

"For the next inn he spurs amain, In haste alights, and skuds away, But time and tide for no man stay."

"Time wears all his locks before, Take thou hold upon his forehead; When he flies he turns no more, And behind his scalp is naked. Works adjourn'd have many stays, Long demurs breed new delays."

"Goe to my Love where she is carelesse layd Yet in her winter's bowere not well awake; Tell her the joyous time will not be staid Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take."

"Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time."

"Too late I staid, forgive the crime, Unheeded flew the hours; How noiseless falls the foot of Time That only treads on flow'rs! What eye with clear account remarks The ebbing of his glass, When all its sands are diamond sparks That dazzle as they pass? Ah! who to sober measurement Time's happy swiftness brings, When birds of Paradise have lent Their plumage for his wings?"

"Long ailments wear out pain, and long hopes joy."

"I see that time divided is never long, and that regularity abridges all things."

"In time take time while time doth last, for time Is no time when time is past."

"Nick of Time!"

"Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying, Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last."

"Lauriger Horatius Quam dixisti verum; Fugit euro citius Tempus edax rerum."

"He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend: Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them."

"Come, Time, and teach me many years, I do not suffer in dream; For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears."

"Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born."

"I am any man's suitor, If any will be my tutor: Some say this life is pleasant, Some think it speedeth fast, In time there is no present, In eternity no future, In eternity no past. We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die. Who will riddle me the how and the why?"

"Heu! universum triduum!"

"I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity; Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again."

"Once in Persia reigned a king Who upon his signet ring Graved a maxim true and wise, Which if held before the eyes Gave him counsel at a glance Fit for every change and chance. Solemn words, and these are they: "Even this shall pass away.""

"Time tries the troth in everything."

"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made."

"To wind the mighty secrets of the past, And turn the key of time."

"And let its meaning permeate Whatever comes, This too shall pass away."

"He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time."

"Our time is a very shadow that passeth away."

"Delivered from the galling yoke of time."

"Therefore fear not to assay To gather, ye that may, The flower that this day Is fresher than the next."

"In records that defy the tooth of time."

"Nothingness is worth exhausting yourself over. Ignore those who ignore you, and cherish those who cherish you. Peace be upon those who have left your life. Trust that nothing lasts forever."

"Everything that's created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness."

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."

"Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy."

"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."

"What is most needed today is a fundamental theological thinking, one centered upon the Godhead itself, and centered upon that which is most challenging or most offensive in the Godhead, one which has truly been veiled in the modern world, except by our most revolutionary thinkers and visionaries. If we allow Blake and Nietzsche to be paradigmatic of those revolutionaries, nowhere else does such a centering upon God or the Godhead occur, although a full parallel to this occurs in Spinoza and Hegel; but the language of Hegel and Spinoza is not actually offensive, or not in its immediate impact, whereas the language of Nietzsche and Blake is the most purely offensive language which has ever been inscribed. Above all this is true of the theological language of Blake and Nietzsche, but here a theological language is a truly universal language, one occurring in every domain, and occurring as that absolute No which is the origin of every repression and every darkness, and a darkness which is finally the darkness of God, or the darkness of that Godhead which is beyond “God.” Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy."

"When it comes to giving, some people stop at nothing."

"Nothing proceeds from nothingness, as also nothing passes away into non-existence."

"Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true."

"Nothing is more real than nothing."

"I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real."

"When we apprehend that it is impossible a thing can arise from nothing, this proposition ex nihilo nihil fit, is not considered as something existing, or as the mode of a thing, but as an eternal truth having its seat in our mind, and is called a common notion or . Of this class are the following: It is impossible the same thing can at once be and not be; what is done cannot be undone; he who thinks must exist while he thinks; and innumerable others, the whole of which it is... difficult to enumerate, but... if blinded by no prejudices, we cannot fail to know them when... thinking them..."

"Nihilists are not kind; They believe in nothing."

"Even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts, but … even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing.… So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie, since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have none of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet's Nothing."

"Et redit in nihilum quod fuit ante nihil."

"Why and Wherefore set out one day, To hunt for a wild Negation. They agreed to meet at a cool retreat On the Point of Interrogation."

"Nothing to do but work, Nothing to eat but food, Nothing to wear but clothes, To keep one from going nude."

"According to logic 'nothing" is that of which everything can truly be denied and nothing can truly be affirmed. The idea therefore either of a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms. And yet according to theologians "God the self existent being is a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being; without parts, figure, motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find in matter. For all such things so plainly and necessarily imply finiteness in their very notion and are utterly inconsistent with complete infinity." Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the XlXth century lacks every quality upon which man's mind is capable of fixing any judgment. What is this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing that is not instantly contradicted. Their own Bible their Revelation destroys all the moral perceptions they heap upon him unless indeed they call those qualities perfections that every other man's reason and common sense call imperfections, odious vices and brutal wickedness."

"Nil actum credens, dum quid superesset agendum."

"Nil igitur fieri de nilo posse putandum es Semine quando opus est rebus."

"Haud igitur redit ad Nihilum res ulla, sed omnes Discidio redeunt in corpora materiai."

""In the midst of life we are in death," said one; it is more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow — a word for that which cannot be — a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence."

"Nor is anything empty: For what is empty is nothing. What is nothing cannot be. Nor does it move; for it has nowhere to betake itself to, but is full. For if there were aught empty, it would betake itself to the empty. But, since there is naught empty, it has nowhere to betake itself to."

"Nothing's new, and nothing's true, and nothing matters."

"All humans will, without exception, eventually die. After they die, the place they go is Mu (nothingness)."

"If all the properties of the universe, such as charge and momentum, balanced out, as Guth, who was a fan as well as a scholar of theories of nothing, pointed out to me, no laws of physics forbade the spontaneous appearance of the universe—or a quantum piece of one. ...Nothing, some physicist implied, might be the ultimate symmetry, everywhere, everywhen the same... Mostly we knew what nothing was not. It was not anything. But it was the possibility of everything. And perhaps such beauty, nothing, was unstable. And the result was every once in an eternity it twitched. ...The first soul brave enough to suggest the universe was indeed nothing was Ed Tryon... [who] blurted it out during a seminar with Sciama, "Suppose the universe is just a quantum fluctuation." Everybody laughed. ... Tryon eventually published these notions in Nature in 1975 and was mostly ignored. Peebles and Dicke had mentioned his work in their famous 1979 paper about enigmas and conundrums."

"Guth... wanted to hear... Alex Vilenkin... describe a new theory of the origin of the universe, of how it could have emerged from nothing. Vilenkin's version of the infant universe... was a kind of metaphysical mole. ...a bubble of universe, space-time, had "tunneled" into a Wheeleresque superspace of possible space-times and then tunneled again into "real" space and time. ...But from where had the universe tunneled into this realm..? In Vilenkin's words, "from nothing." ...Vilenkin's tiny bubble... inflated and went through the standard expansion and evolution of the big bang. ...he, Guth, and Sidney Coleman sat and had a conversation that Lewis Carroll might have enjoyed, about nothing. ..."Nothing," answered Vilenkin... "is no time, no space." ..."There is an epoch without time," [Coleman] said finally as the shadows lengthened. "It is an enternity. So we make a quantum leap from eternity into time." Then, as good physicists did, they repaired to a Chinese restaurant."

"Gigni De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti."

"Gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil agens. Sibi molesta, et aliis odiosissima."

"Rust Cohle: In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped... like a nightmare you keep waking up into."

"We are nothing, let us be all."

"The non-existent was not; the existent was not at that time. The atmosphere was not nor the heavens which are beyond. What was concealed? Where? In whose protection? Was it water? An unfathomable abyss?"

"It is, no doubt, an immense advantage to have done nothing, but one should not abuse it."

"I am not all that is. I am Life fighting Nothingness."

"The interaction of nothing with nothing—the relationship between nothing and nothing—will, ultimately, be nothing."

"Operose nihil agunt."

"Where every something, being blent together Turns to a wild of nothing."

"A life of nothing's nothing worth, From that first nothing ere his birth, To that last nothing under earth."

"There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities."

"Nothing, thou elder brother e'en to shade."

"[...] if you take nihilism in the strong sense, the sense of a nothing-based thinking, a thinking which might start out from the axiom ‘why is there nothing rather than something?’ – overturning the fundamental philosophical question, the question of being: ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ – then I don’t mind being called a nihilist."

"What is seen does not differ from what is empty, what is empty does not differ from what is seen. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It is the same for feeling, perception, intention and consciousness."

"It's calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion."

"[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."

"Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves."

"I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

"Only the dead could afford oblivion."

"No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away."

"Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion."

"I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."

"Wishing to grab the life with nothingness wanting to erase the sigh of tiredness forgetting myself completely from my being why do I seek embrace of yours do not ask me, I know not, I am in oblivion."

"Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."

"As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that."

"Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before...and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world."

"Oblivion - what a blessing...for the mind to dwell a world away from pain."

"Oblivion is not to be hired."

"For those sacred powers Tread on oblivion: no desert of ours Can be entombed in their celestial breasts."

"It is not in the storm nor in the strife We feel benumb'd, and wish to be no more, But in the after-silence on the shore, When all is lost, except a little life."

"Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past."

"And o'er the past oblivion stretch her wing."

"He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more."

"Injuriarum remedium est oblivio."

"What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion."

"Eo magis præfulgebant quod non videbantur."

"But from your mind's chilled sky It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings Among your soul's forlornest things; A speck upon your memory, alack! A dead fly in a dusty window-crack."

"Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense."

"I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far."

"It seems a little paradoxical to construct a configuration space with the coordinates of points which do not exist."

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable."

"Paradoxes often arise because theory routinely refuses to be subordinate to reality."

"Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin of all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion — adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth."

"The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox."

"A paradox is a situation which gives one answer when analyzed one way, and a different answer when analyzed another way, so that we are left in somewhat of a quandary as to actually what should happen. Of course, in physics there are never any real paradoxes because there is only one correct answer; at least we believe that nature will act in only one way (and that is the right way, naturally). So in physics a paradox is only a confusion in our own understanding."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

"The Greeks observed a paradox about the dyad: While it appears separate from unity, its opposite poles remember their source and attract each other in an attempt to merge and return to the state of unity. The dyad simultaneously divides and unites, repels and attracts, separates and returns."

"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes."

"A great many individuals ever since the rise of the mathematical method, have, each for himself, attacked its direct and indirect consequences. ...I shall call each of these persons a paradoxer, and his system a paradox. I use the word in the old sense: ...something which is apart from general opinion, either in subject-matter, method, or conclusion. ...Thus in the sixteenth century many spoke of the earth's motion as the paradox of Copernicus, who held the ingenuity of that theory in very high esteem, and some, I think, who even inclined towards it. In the seventeenth century, the depravation of meaning took place... Phillips says paradox is "a thing which seemeth strange"—here is the old meaning...—"and absurd, and is contrary to common opinion," which is an addition due to his own time."

"Paradox, a thing that seems strange, absurd and contrary to common Opinion: In Rhetorick, Paradoxon is something cast in by the by, contrary to the Opinion or Expectation of the Auditors, and otherwise call'd Hypomone. Paradoxol or Paradoxical, belonging to a Paradox, surprizing."

"The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur — what species of impossibilities are possible."

"Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science."

"The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes."

"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science."

"These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse."

"You undergo too strict a paradox, Striving to make an ugly deed look fair."

"More than any other Hellenic thinker, Julian insisted on the virtue of paradox and on the importance of the search for religious truth."

"But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and our interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical."

"PARADOX: A statement that reduces the matter at hand to complete obscurity while clarifying it. … Paradoxes are sensitive and can be routed by sneering."

"Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained."

"A Paradox is truth spelt with seven letters instead of five"

"For thence, — a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, — Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale."

"Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the Historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.""

"The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible."

"Plato said that virtue has no master [Republic 617e]. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself."

"A very important principle in investing is that you don't have to make it back the way you lost it. And, in fact, it's usually a mistake to try and make it back it the way you lost it."

"Principle is ever my motto, no expediency."

"Precedents are not mere dusty phrases, which do not substantially affect the question before us. A precedent embalms a principle. The principle may be right or may be wrong—that is a question for discussion; but at the first glance it is right to conclude that it is a principle that has been acted upon and recognised by those who preceded us."

"Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos."

"Unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how should you know if he acts ill?"

"If the ruling class thinks that by hanging us, hanging a few anarchists, they can crush out anarchy, they will be badly mistaken, because the anarchist loves his principles more than his life."

"The man of action is always unprincipled; none but the contemplative has a conscience."

"Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle."

"When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking."

"I don't believe in princerple, But, oh, I du in interest."

"Ez to my princerples, I glory In hevin' nothin' o' the sort."

"I wish to establish some sort of system not guided by chance but by some sort of definite and exact principle."

"[Many historians of morality,] Mostly Englishmen, … affirm some consensus of the nations, at least of the tame nations, concerning certain principles of morals, and then they infer from this that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me; or, conversely, they see the truth that among different nations moral valuations are necessarily different and then infer from this that no morality is at all binding. Both procedures are equally childish."

"God does not love that which is already in itself worthy of love, but on the contrary, that which in itself has no worth acquires worth just by becoming the object of God's love. Agape has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object. Agape does not recognize value, but creates it. Agape loves, and imparts value by loving. The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him. Agape is a value-creating principle."

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor to think well; this is the principle of morality."

"In Islam, there is no priesthood, and no intermediary between the creature and The Creator; but every Muslim from the ends of earth or in the paths of the sea has the ability of himself to approach his Lord without priest or minister. Nor again can the Muslim administrator derive his authority from any papacy, or from Heaven; but he derives it solely from the Muslim community. Similarly, he derives his principles of administration from the religious law, which is universal in its understanding and application and before which all men come everywhere as equals."

"Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles."

"This world is strange and incomprehensible, and there are many people who are lost and worried. When you ask who is the oppressor, it turns out that everyone is oppressed.~~ March 8, 2025"

"The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds."

"This restless world Is full of chances, which by habit's power To learn to bear is easier than to shun."

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn."

"Securus judicat orbis terrarum."

"It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."

"This world's a bubble."

"Earth took her shining station as a star, In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds."

"Dieu est le poète, les hommes ne sont que les acteurs. Ces grandes pièces qui se jouent sur la terre ont été composées dans le ciel."

"Fly away, pretty moth, to the shade Of the leaf where you slumbered all day; Be content with the moon and the stars, pretty moth, And make use of your wings while you may. * * * * * * But tho' dreams of delight may have dazzled you quite, They at last found it dangerous play; Many things in this world that look bright, pretty moth, Only dazzle to lead us astray."

"Let the world slide."

"The world is like a board with holes in it, and the square men have got into the round holes, and the round into the square."

"Renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world."

"The pomps and vanity of this wicked world."

"He sees that this great roundabout, The world, with all its motley rout, Church, army, physic, law, Its customs and its businesses, Is no concern at all of his, And says—what says he?—Caw."

"'Tis a very good world we live in To spend, and to lend, and to give in; But to beg, or to borrow, or ask for our own; 'Tis the very worst world that ever was known."

"The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric."

"In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world, Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost."

"O world as God has made it! All is beauty."

"The innumerable worlds in the cosmos are like the eyes of the net. Each and every world is different, its variety infinite. So too are the Dharma Doors (methods of cultivation) taught by the Buddhas."

"The wide world is all before us— But a world without a friend."

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee."

"Well, well, the world must turn upon its axis, And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails, And live and die, make love and pay our taxes, And as the veering winds shift, shift our sails."

"Such is the world. Understand it, despise it, love it; cheerfully hold on thy way through it, with thy eye on highest loadstars!"

"The true Sovereign of the world, who moulds the world like soft wax, according to his pleasure, is he who lovingly sees into the world."

"Socrates, quidem, cum rogaretur cujatem se esse diceret, "Mundanum," inquit; totius enim mundi se incolam et civem arbitrabatur."

"This is the best world, that we live in, To lend and to spend and to give in: But to borrow, or beg, or to get a man's own, It is the worst world that ever was known."

"'Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat, To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the Great Babel, and not feel the crowd."

"Such stuff the world is made of."

"For a brief space conceive yourself to be transported to one of the loftiest peaks of some inaccessible mountain, thence gaze on the appearances of things lying below you, and with eyes turned in various directions look upon the eddies of the billowy world, while you yourself are removed from earthly contacts—you will at once begin to feel compassion for the world, and with self-recollection and increasing gratitude to God, you will rejoice with all the greater joy that you have escaped it."

"And for the few that only lend their ear, That few is all the world."

"Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti."

"The Doctor: It’s like when you’re a kid. The first time they tell you that the world’s turning and you just can’t quite believe it ’cause everything looks like it’s standing still… I can feel it: the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at 1,000 miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it. We’re falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go… That’s who I am."

"The idea that defines all humanism is that the world is not a given world, foreign to man, one to which he has to force himself to yield without. It is the world willed by man, insofar as his will expresses his genuine reality."

"Quel est-il en effet? C'est un verre qui luit, Qu'un souffle peut detruire, et qu'un souffle a produit."

"Come! Behold this world, which is like a decorated royal chariot. Here fools flounder, but the wise have no attachment to it."

"I am a citizen of the world."

"Asked where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world.""

"Over at our place, we're sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don't think of grown-ups, and we don't think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall."

"The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right."

"Since every man who lives is born to die, And none can boast sincere felicity, With equal mind, what happens let us bear, Nor joy nor grieve too much for things beyond our care. Like pilgrims, to th' appointed place we tend; The world's an inn, and death the journey's end."

"The world's a stage where God's omnipotence, His justice, knowledge, love and providence, Do act the parts."

"I take the world to be but as a stage, Where net-maskt men doo play their personage."

"But they will maintain the state of the world; And all their desire is in the work of their craft."

"Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage, Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on the sage Philosophers are, saith he, whose part is to learn The manners of all nations, and the good from the bad to discern."

"Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine."

"Shall I speak truly what I now see below? The World is all a carkass, smoak and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just Nothing."

"Map me no maps, sir; my head is a map, a map of the whole world."

"Long ago a man of the world was defined as a man who in every serious crisis is invariably wrong."

"Mais dans ce monde, il n'y a rien d'assure que le mort et les impots."

"Eppur si muove. (Epur)."

"It takes 11 guys to change the world. It takes five to change a university."

"Nor is this world inhabited by man the first of things earthly created by God. He made several worlds before ours, but He destroyed them all, because He was pleased with none until He created ours. But even this last world would have had no permanence, if God had executed His original plan of ruling it according to the principle of strict justice. It was only when He saw that justice by itself would undermine the world that He associated mercy with justice, and made them to rule jointly. Thus, from the beginning of all things prevailed Divine goodness, without which nothing could have continued to exist. If not for it, the myriads of evil spirits had soon put an end to the generations of men."

"Il mondo è un bel libro, ma poco serve a chi non lo sa leggere."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade— A breath can make them, as a breath has made— But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroy'd can never be supplied."

"Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!"

"I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again."

"Earth is but the frozen echo of the silent voice of God."

"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

"Let the world slide, let the world go; A fig for care and a fig for woe! If I can't pay, why I can owe, And death makes equal the high and low."

"The world's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and nature do with actors fill."

"Nor is this lower world but a huge inn, And men the rambling passengers."

"There are two worlds; the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imaginations."

"The belief that the world would end in 2012 was inconsistent with ’s theology, which does not include a doctrine of the end of the world."

"The nations are as a drop of a bucket."

"World without end."

"οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ἡ φιλία τοῦ κόσμου ἔχθρα τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστιν; ὃς ἐὰν οὖν βουληθῇ φίλος εἶναι τοῦ κόσμου, ἐχθρὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ καθίσταται."

"The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself."

"It takes all sorts of people to make a world."

"This world, where much is to be done and little to be known."

"I never have sought the world; the world was not to seek me."

"If there is one beast in all the loathsome fauna of civilization I hate and despise, it is a man of the world."

"Upon the battle ground of heaven and hell I palsied stand."

"Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!"

"Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world."

"We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us. The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves."

"Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."

"The world goes up and the world goes down, And the sunshine follows the rain; And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again, Sweet wife. No, never come over again."

"For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so wide— It never done no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried!"

""Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" is the greatest phrase ever written. If everyone followed that creed, this world would be a paradise."

"If all the world must see the world As the world the world hath seen, Then it were better for the world That the world had never been."

"It is an ugly world. Offend Good people, how they wrangle, The manners that they never mend, The characters they mangle. They eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod, And go to church on Sunday— And many are afraid of God— And more of Mrs. Grundy."

"I was borne on an eagle's wing, Till with the noon-sun perishing; Then I stood in a world alone, From which all other life was gone, Whence warmth, and breath, and light were fled, A world o'er which a curse was said: The trees stood leafless all, and bare, The sky spread, but no sun was there: Night came, no stars were on her way, Morn came without a look of day,— As night and day shared one pale shroud, Without a colour or a cloud. And there were rivers, but they stood Without a murmur on the flood, Waveless and dark, their task was o'er,— The sea lay silent on the shore, Without a sign upon its breast Save of interminable rest: And there were palaces and halls, But silence reign'd amid their walls, Though crowds yet fill'd them; for no sound Rose from the thousands gather'd round; All wore the same white, bloodless hue, All the same eyes of glassy blue, Meaningless, cold, corpse-like as those No gentle hand was near to close. And all seem'd, as they look'd on me, In wonder that I yet could be A moving shape of warmth and breath Alone amid a world of death."

"O what a glory doth this world put on For him who, with a fervent heart, goes forth Under the bright and glorious sky, and looks On duties well performed, and days well spent!"

"Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us. There lies the Land of Song; there lies the poet's native land."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

"One day with life and heart, Is more than time enough to find a world."

"Flammantia mœnia mundi."

"When the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that are not heaven."

"The world in all doth but two nations bear, The good, the bad, and these mixed everywhere."

"This world is full of beauty, as other worlds above, And if we did our duty, it might be as full of love."

"I feel like I live in a world made of cardboard. Always taking constant care not to break something. To break someone. Never allowing myself to lose control, even for a moment, or someone could die."

"The world's a stage on which all parts are played."

"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call Earth."

"Hanging in a golden chain This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."

"A boundless continent, Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of night Starless expos'd."

"Then stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, "Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O World.""

"The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide."

"If you have been inside my head, then you know what I've seen. The suffering. Every moment in time and space is burning. It must end, and I intend to end it the only way I can."

"To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world. We are heading for a radical revision where you could say we are heading towards the end of the world, but more in the R.E.M. sense than the Revelation sense. That is what apocalypse means – revelation. I could square that with the end of the world, a revelation, a new way of looking at things, something that completely radicalises our notions of the where we were, when we were, what we were, something like that would constitute an end to the world in the kind of abstract – yet very real sense – that I am talking about. A change in the language, a change in the thinking, a change in the music. It wouldn’t take much – one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting – who knows – we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger and stranger than they ever were before. They are realised at a greater speed, everything has become very fluid."

"The Doctor: There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace. We’ve got work to do."

"Le monde n'est qu'une bransloire perenne."

"Is it not a noble farce wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the vast universe serves for a theatre?"

"Or may I think when toss'd in trouble, This world at best is but a bubble."

"This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given; The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow,— There's nothing true but Heaven."

"This outer world is but the pictured scroll Of worlds within the soul; A colored chart, a blazoned missal-book, Whereon who rightly look May spell the splendors with their mortal eyes, And steer to Paradise."

"We look at this as the best of all possible worlds, but the French know it isn't, because most people speak English."

"Think, in this battered Caravanserai, Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day, How Sultán after Sultán with his Pomp Abode his destined Hour, and went his way."

"The world is large, when its weary leagues two loving hearts divide; But the world is small, when your enemy is loose on the other side."

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

"Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem; The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream."

"By faith Noah, after receiving divine warning of things not yet seen, showed godly fear and constructed an ark for the saving of his household; and through this faith he condemned the world, and he became an heir of the righteousness that results from faith."

"Quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem."

"To me it seems that they who grasp the world, The kingdom and the power and the glory, Must pay with deepest misery of spirit, Atoning unto God for a brief brightness."

"Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds, and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him he returned this answer: "Do you not think it is a matter worthy of lamentation that where there is such a vast multitude of them we have not yet conquered one?""

"But as the world, harmoniously confused, Where order in variety we see; And where, tho' all things differ, all agree."

"Every soul will taste death, and you will only be given your (full compensation) on the Day of Resurrection. So he who is drawn away from the Fire and admitted to Paradise has attained (his desire). And what is the life of this world is nothing but the enjoyment of delusion."

"My soul, what's lighter than a feather? Wind. Than wind? The fire. And what than fire? The mind. What's lighter than the mind? A thought. Than thought? This bubble world. What than this bubble? Nought."

"Looking at beauty in the world is the first step of purify the mind. A corrupted mind can't recognize the beauty of the world. A pure mind perceives it."

"All nations and kindreds and people and tongues."

"The world of the future will not flourish behind walls—no matter who builds them and no matter what their purpose. A world divided economically must inevitably be a world divided politically. As Secretary of State, I cannot contemplate that prospect with anything but deep disquiet."

"Le monde est le livre des femmes."

"The worlde bie diffraunce ys ynn orderr founde."

"Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something."

"Es liebt die Welt, das Stralende zu schwärzen Und das Erhabne in den Staub zu ziehn."

"Denn nur vom Nutzen wird die Welt regiert."

"Most people in the world are poor. If we knew the economy of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matter. Most of the world's poor people earn their living in agriculture. If we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economic of being poor."

"Non sum uni angulo natus; patria mea totus hic est mundus."

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

"This wide and universal theatre Presents more woful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in."

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!"

"For some must watch, while some must sleep; So runs the world away."

"Would I were dead! if God's good will were so: For what is in this world but grief and woe?"

"Mad world. Mad kings. Mad composition."

"The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them."

"To be imprisoned in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence around about The pendent world."

"I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano: A stage where every man must play a part."

"Why, then, the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open."

"The world is grown so bad, That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch."

"Like bubbles in the water, the worlds rise, exist and dissolve in the Supreme Self, which is the material cause and the prop of everything."

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

"The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn."

"Our leaders tell us there is only one world: the existing world, the globalised world, the hegemonic world. ‘Either sink or swim’, they say. The truth of the matter is that the working people are sinking in the globalised world, while the elite are swimming in it. It is clear therefore that there is a contest between two worldviews: one which wants to maintain the existing world; the other that wants to create an alternative world. Which worldview do we share? We must make a choice, and act in accordance with our choice. [...] The pundits of the status quo have in common with all dominating classes and hegemonic powers the assumption that the existing world is the only realistic world, and no alternative world is possible. Yet, it is the struggle for an alternative world, a better world, which has changed the past and will continue to change the present for a better future. We, the activists, together with the working people, must continue to fight for a better world. An alternative world is possible."

"Making a perpetual mansion of this poor baiting place."

"the world is big/Big and bright and round/And it's full of folks like me/Who are black, yellow, beige and brown"

"If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes,—some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,—and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other."

"O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers."

"This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me."

"I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own."

"The world cannot be translated; it can only be dreamed of and touched."

"My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world."

"There was all the world and his wife."

"In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless."

"Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

"A mad world, my masters."

"So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be."

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drums throbb'd, no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law."

"The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion."

"Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist."

"Anchorite, who didst dwell With all the world for cell!"

"For, if the worlds In worlds enclosed should on his senses burst * * * He would abhorrent turn."

"Heed not the folk who sing or say In sonnet sad or sermon chill, "Alas, alack, and well-a-day! This round world's but a bitter pill." We too are sad and careful; still We'd rather be alive than not."

"There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself."

"Do we have all the hatred and all the aversion for the world which Our Lord requires, and which his example must inspire in us?"

"Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes."

"Why is the world so beautiful? is a question that we all ought to be embracing."

"People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift."

"Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new."

"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."

"If we suppose a sufficient righteousness and intelligence in men to produce presently, from the tremendous lessons of history, an effective will for a world peace—that is to say, an effective will for a world law under a world government—for in no other fashion is a secure world peace conceivable—in what manner may we expect things to move towards this end?… It is an educational task, and its very essence is to bring to the minds of all men everywhere, as a necessary basis for world cooperation, a new telling and interpretation, a common interpretation, of history."

"I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world."

"What is this world? A net to snare the soule."

"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

"Was ist ihm nun die Welt? ein weiter leerer Raum, Fortunen's Spielraum, frei ihr Rad herum zu rollen."

"I have my beauty,—you your Art— Nay, do not start: One world was not enough for two Like me and you."

"I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them."

"When the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world Have hung upon the beatings of my heart."

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours."

"The world's a bubble—and the life of man Less than a span. In his conception wretched, and from the womb So to the tomb. Nurst from the cradle, and brought up to years With cares and fears. Who then to frail mortality shall trust, But limns in water, and but writes in dust."

"Man of the World (for such wouldst thou be called)— And art thou proud of that inglorious style?"

"They most the world enjoy who least admire."

"Let not the cooings of the world allure thee: Which of her lovers ever found her true?"

"My death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me."

"“Destiny,” said John. “The ghastliest word a man can speak.”"

"Destiny, prosperity -- the wood of destiny, wood of prosperity, and the reeds of destiny, reeds of prosperity, adorn the holy cattle-pen."

"Lifting your head in your goodness, greatness and majesty, majestically you extend your arm in order to determine destinies."

"God does reprobate some. For it was said above (A[1]) that predestination is a part of providence. To providence, however, it belongs to permit certain defects in those things which are subject to providence, as was said above (Q[22], A[2]). Thus, as men are ordained to eternal life through the providence of God, it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation. Thus, as predestination is a part of providence, in regard to those ordained to eternal salvation, so reprobation is a part of providence in regard to those who turn aside from that end. Hence reprobation implies not only foreknowledge, but also something more, as does providence, as was said above (Q[22], A[1]). Therefore, as predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory; so also reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin."

"Che l'uomo il suo destin fugge di raro."

"[God] promised not from the power of our will but from His own predestination. For He promised what He Himself would do, not what men would do. Because, although men do those good things which pertain to God’s worship, He Himself makes them to do what He has commanded; it is not they that cause Him to do what He has promised. Otherwise the fulfilment of God’s promises would not be in the power of God, but in that of men."

"Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny."

"We believe that all the posterity of Adam, being thus fallen into perdition and ruin by the sin of our first parents, God then did manifest himself such as he is; that is to say, merciful and just: Merciful, since he delivers and preserves from this perdition all whom he, in his eternal and unchangeable council, of mere goodness hath elected in Christ Jesus our Lord, without respect to their works: Just, in leaving others in the fall and perdition wherein they have involved themselves."

"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them. Desire, the strongest thing in the world, is itself all future, and it is not for nothing that in all the religions the motive is always forwards to an endless futurity of bliss or annihilation. Now that religion gives place to science the paradisical future of the soul fades before the Utopian future of the species, and still the future rules. But always there is, on the other side, destiny, that which inevitably will happen, a future here concerned not as the other was with man and his desires, but blindly and inexorably with the whole universe of space and time. The Buddhist seeks to escape from the Wheel of Life and Death, the Christian passes through them in the faith of another world to come, the modern reformer, as unrealistic but less imaginative, demands his chosen future in this world of men. Can we in any better way reconcile desire and fate?"

"DESTINY, n. A tyrant's authority for crime and fool's excuse for failure."

"Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved."

"There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences."

"For I am a weed, Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail, Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail."

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God."

"I believe that we are given choices, places where decisions may be made to walk one road or another. We do not know what provides these choices, but we may call it destiny to give a name to that which is unknowable. Destiny offers the choices, but we choose the road."

"We create our own destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities and be responsible for our choices."

"The trick in chasing destiny is to feel it as a rider, a rider on a spinning ball waiting for a rare chance in time. Those few moments of balance between darkness and light where the infinite is in motion and the motion is felt as a dance, as a solution that dissolves the question."

"[Ivan:] "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth." "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly."

"No people are truly free until they can determine their own destiny."

"Nature—pitiless in a pitiless universe—is certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting this earth. Hence, our destiny, with the aid of God, remains in our own hands."

"Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it."

"Nothing is more seductive than a sense of destiny."

"Sometimes a man can still meet his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."

"Weddyng is desteny, And hangyng likewise."

"Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. "We condition them to thrive on heat," concluded Mr. Foster. "Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.""

"If the heavens turn against me, I can do nothing."

"Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But it is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. Understanding the law of karma is known as the light of the world because through this understanding we can take responsibility for our destinies and be truly more guided to greater fulfillment in our lives."

"'Tis strange how the heart can create Or colour from itself its fate; We make ourselves our own distress, We are ourselves our happiness."

"Living in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies."

"We can't run from who we are. Our destiny chooses us."

"Destiny is the bridge you build to the one you love."

"We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us."

"We are what we must And not what we would be. I know that one hour Assures not another. The will and the power Are diverse."

"Destiny has a funny way When it comes and takes all your cares away I can't think of a single thing Other than what a beautiful state I'm in"

"We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified."

"Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny."

"When one has made a mistake, one says. "Another time I shall know what to do," when one should say is: "I already know what I shall really do another time.""

"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace."

"A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself."

"The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire."

"When we heard what they [Simmias and Cebes] said we were all depressed, as we told each other afterwards. We had been quite convinced by the previous argument [Socrates' argument], and they seemed to confuse us again, and to drive us to doubt not only what had already been said but also what was going to be said, lest we be worthless as critics or the subject itself [the fate of the soul] admitted of no certainty."

"when a girl is wedded, her fate is fixedwhen a child is born, his stars are fixedlife is fixed, love is fixed, death is fixed"

"The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger."

"I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive."

"What a falling-off was there!"

"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm."

"Imperious Cæsar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!"

"Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day."

"We shall be winnow'd with so rough a wind That even our corn shall seem as light as chaff, And good from bad find no partition."

"Here burns my candle out; ay, here it dies, Which, whiles it lasted, gave King Henry light."

"Think you I bear the shears of destiny? Have I commandment on the pulse of life?"

"For it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell."

"What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?"

"Things at the worst will cease or else climb upward To what they were before."

"If he had been as you and you as he, You would have slipt like him."

"A man whom both the waters and the wind, In that vast tennis-court, hath made the ball For them to play upon."

"They that stand high have many blasts to shake them; And if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces."

"What is done cannot be now amended."

"But He, that hath the steerage of my course, Direct my sail!"

"And all the bustle of departure—sometimes sad, sometimes intoxicating—just as fear or hope may be inspired by the new chances of coming destiny."

"And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land."

"Quisque suos patimur manes."

"God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death. As God hath appointed the elect unto glory, so hath He, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto. Wherefore, they who are elected . . . are effectually called unto faith in Christ by His Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power. through faith, unto salvation. Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as He pleaseth, for the glory of His Sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice. (Chap. III — Articles I, III, VI and VII)"

"We talk about destiny, about what's meant to be, when in reality it's usually a combination of failure plus time, a series of adjusted circumstances, a question of human resilience and ability to reconfigure our expectations."

"Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart."

"Art and power will go on as they have done,—will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time."

"Character is fate. (Destiny)."

"No living man can send me to the shades Before my time; no man of woman born, Coward or brave, can shun his destiny."

"All, soon or late, are doom'd that path to tread."

"The future works out great men's destinies: The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever."

"We are but as the instrument of Heaven. Our work is not design, but destiny."

"Unseen hands delay The coming of what oft seems close in ken, And, contrary, the moment, when we say "'Twill never come!" comes on us even then."

"They only fall, that strive to move, Or lose, that care to keep."

"The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, forever."

"Every man meets his Waterloo at last."

"Ich fühl 's das ich der Mann des Schicksals bin."

"Truly some men there be That live always in great horrour, And say it goeth by destiny To hang or wed: both hath one hour; And whether it be, I am well sure, Hanging is better of the twain; Sooner done, and shorter pain."

"The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears."

"Thou cam'st not to thy place by accident, It is the very place God meant for thee; And should'st thou there small room for action see, Do not for this give room for discontent."

"Tes destins sont d'un homme, et tes vœux sont d'un dieu."

"Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar; Break but one Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar Through all will run."

"One country, one constitution, one destiny."

"To be a Prodigal's favourite,—then worse truth, A Miser's Pensioner,—behold our lot!"

"Another error is an impatience of doubt, and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients: the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation: if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

"Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt there truth is—'tis her shadow."

"All doubt is cowardice — all trust is brave."

"Doubt is natural to a human being, for his conceptions are infinite, his powers are only finite."

"Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone."

"We should never believe anything we have not dared to doubt."

"If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it&mdash;the life of that man is one long sin against mankind."

"Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete."

"He would not, with a peremptory tone, Assert the nose upon his face his own."

"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning."

"The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom."

"Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation..."

"Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything."

"Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it."

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. ... it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. ... I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here ... I might think about it a little bit ... but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened about not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me."

"Doubt grows with knowledge."

"Is God fair? The Christians say that God damns forever anyone who is skeptical about truth of bunkistic religion as revealed unto the holy haranguers. What this means is that a God, if any, punishes a man for using his reason. If there is a God in existence, reasons should be available for his existence. Assuming that such a precious thing as a man's eternal future depends on his belief in a God, then the materials for that belief should be overwhelming and not at all doubtful. Yet here is a man whose reason makes it impossible for him to believe in a God. He sees no evidence of such an entity. He finds all the arguments weak and worthless. He doubts and he denies. Then is a God fair in visiting upon such a skeptic the penalty for his inevitable intellectual attitude? The intelligent man refuses to believe fairy tales. Can a God blame him? If so, then a God is not as fair as an ordinarily decent man. And fairness, we think, is more important than piety."

"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."

"To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death."

"Fear believes — courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays — courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism — courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion — courage is science."

"I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous — if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men."

"I may be wrong, and often am, but I never doubt."

"Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will."

"I do think it strange that people have doubted everything and have again reached certainty, without as much as dropping a word concerning the difficulties which have held my thought captive—so much so that I have, now and then, longed to be freed of them—freed by the aid of one, note well, who was aware of these difficulties, and not of one who in his sleep had a notion to doubt, and to have doubted, everything, and again in his sleep had the notion that he is explaining, and has explained, all."

"What is clear to one man may be doubtful to another."

"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking."

"Doubt is useful, it keeps faith a living thing. After all, you cannot know the strength of your faith until it has been tested."

"She had learned to doubt, rather than simply to question."

"And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

"To know much is often the cause of doubting more."

"I should always like to follow in the path of Goethe when he said: "If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own"."

"The doubtful beam long nods from side to side."

"Believe it or not"

"We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt."

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

"William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

"The Vammika Sutta likens skeptical doubt to a fork in the road. Say a traveler who is carrying many valuables arrives at a fork in the road; if he lingers there unable to decide which way to take, robbers may catch and possibly kill him. In the same way, a doubtful meditator who falls prey to wavering and procrastination cannot continue on with practice. He or she will then become a victim of mental defilements and be unable to escape the cycle of suffering. Only when he or she abandons doubt by noting it and uninterruptedly continues the practice can he or she be liberated from the cycle of suffering."

"But yet, madam— I do not like, "but yet," it does allay The good precedence; fie upon "but yet!" "But yet" is a gaoler to bring forth Some monstrous malefactor."

"To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?"

"But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in To saucy doubts and fears."

"Our doubts are traitors And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt."

"To be once in doubt Is once to be resolv'd."

"No hinge nor loop, To hang a doubt on."

"Modest doubt is call'd The beacon of the wise."

"Out of doubt comes faith."

"There lives more faith in honest doubt,Believe me, than in half the creeds."

"Doubt, indeed, is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization. It is the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith which springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best."

"Only those who doubt really believe, and those who do not doubt are neither tempted against their faith nor do they truly believe."

"Those who do not doubt do not believe. Faith is maintained by resolving doubts, and again resolving those further doubts which are suggested by the resolution of previous doubts."

"La doute n'est pas un état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule."

"Doubt is for the dying."

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

"Non men che saver, dubbiar m'aggrata."

"Uncertain ways unsafest are, And doubt a greater mischief than despair."

"Vous ne prouvez que trop que chercher à connaître N'est souvent qu' apprendre à douter."

"Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized."

"When in doubt, win the trick."

"He who dallies is a dastard, He who doubts is damned."

"But the gods are dead— Ay, Zeus is dead, and all the gods but Doubt, And doubt is brother devil to Despair!"

"Fain would I but dare not; I dare, and yet I may not; I may, although I care not for pleasure when I play not."

"And he that doubteth is damned if he eat."

"To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting."

"I follow my law and fulfil it all duly—and look! when your doubt runneth high— North points to the needle!"

"Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door."

"You ask bitterly, like Pontius Pilate, "What is truth?" In such an hour what remains? I reply, "Obedience." Leave those thoughts for the present. Act — be merciful and gentle — honest; force yourself to abound in little services; try to do good to others; be true in the duty that you know. That must be right, whatever else is uncertain. And by all the laws of the human heart, by the word of God, you shall not be left to doubt. Do that much of the will of God which is plain to you, and "You shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.""

"To get rid of your doubts, part with your sin. Put away your intemperance, your dishonesty, your unlawful ways of making money, your sensuality, your falsehood, acted or spoken, and see if a holy life be not the best disperser of unwelcome doubts, and new obedience the most certain guide to fresh assurance."

"Fear not to confront realities. The Saviour lives; and the first joy that you will give to Him is when, leaving off your false excuses, you throw yourself with a full heart and empty hands into His arms of mercy. The Saviour lives; and were you now to die looking for salvation only from that Friend of Sinners, verily this day should you be with Him in a better than Adam's paradise. The Saviour lives; and in full sympathy with that wondrous lover of men's souls, the Holy Spirit is even now ready if besought to begin His sanctifying process in your mind. The Saviour lives; and even now He stretches out toward you an arm which, if you only grasp in thankful love, your faith shall strengthen while you cling, and it will be from no weakness in that arm, if you are not erelong exalted to a point of holy attainment which at this moment you view with despair, and by and by to that region of unveiled realities where you will ask in wonder at yourself, "Wherefore did I doubt?""

"Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say, "I must and will know the truth." That did not John the Baptist. Brethren, John appealed to Christ."

"People, when asked if they are Christians, give some of the strangest answers you ever heard. Some will say if you ask them: "Well — well — well, I, — I hope I am." Suppose a man should ask me if I am an American. Would I say: "Well, I — well, I — I hope I am?""

"The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato, and of Rome."

"I am the prince who decides the destiny of rolling rivers. I keep on the straight and narrow path the righteous who follow Enlil's counsel. [...] If I fix a fate, who shall alter it? If I but say the word, who shall change it?"

"For whatever reasons, Ray, call it . . . fate, call it luck, call it karma. I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that we were destined to get thrown out of this dump."

"Fate has a way of circling back on a man, and taking him by surprise. A man sees things differently at different times in his life. This town didn't seem the same now that he was older."

"The heart is its own Fate."

"There's nothing you can know that isn't known Nothing you can see that isn't shown There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be It's easy"

"Let those deplore their doom, Whose hope still grovels in this dark sojourn: But lofty souls, who look beyond the tomb, Can smile at Fate, and wonder how they mourn."

"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them. Desire, the strongest thing in the world, is itself all future, and it is not for nothing that in all the religions the motive is always forwards to an endless futurity of bliss or annihilation. Now that religion gives place to science the paradisical future of the soul fades before the Utopian future of the species, and still the future rules. But always there is, on the other side, destiny, that which inevitably will happen, a future here concerned not as the other was with man and his desires, but blindly and inexorably with the whole universe of space and time. The Buddhist seeks to escape from the Wheel of Life and Death, the Christian passes through them in the faith of another world to come, the modern reformer, as unrealistic but less imaginative, demands his chosen future in this world of men. Can we in any better way reconcile desire and fate?"

"There is no fate but what we make."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

"Many things happen between the cup and the lip."

"Success, the mark no mortal wit, Or surest hand, can always hit: For whatsoe'er we perpetrate, We do but row, we're steer'd by Fate, Which in success oft disinherits, For spurious causes, noblest merits."

"Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye."

"Fate is created, not ordained."

"Fate was turning a page in her Book of Delusions."

"Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread; Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow."

"Le sort fait les parents, la choix fait les amis."

"He has gone to the demnition bow-wows."

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that May be only?"

"Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand— Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another."

"People are the pawns of fate."

"Marty, the future isn't written. It can be changed. You know that. Anyone can make their future whatever they want it to be."

"How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is."

"Adam: Nature mandates that mankind will eventually succumb to its poison. However, humans created their own poison, called medicine. It's delusional to believe you can poison Nature to avoid your fate."

"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."

"Naomi: Each person is born with their fate written into their own genetic code... it's unchangeable, immutable... But that's not all there is to life. I finally realized that. I told you before. The reason that I was interested in genes and DNA. Because I wanted to know who I was... where I came from. I thought that if I analyzed my DNA I could find out who I was, who my parents were. And I thought that if I knew that, then I'd know what path I should take in life. But I was wrong. I didn't find anything. I didn't learn anything. Just like with the Genome Soldiers... you can input all the genetic information, but that doesn't make them into the strongest soldiers. The most we can say about DNA is that it governs a person's potential strengths... potential destiny. You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate... to be ruled by your genes. Humans can choose the type of life they want to live."

"There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible."

"'Tis strange how the heart can create Or colour from itself its fate; We make ourselves our own distress, We are ourselves our happiness."

"All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme."

"Everything is preordained. Even my responses."

"We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us."

"So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated."

"Fool, don't you know you cannot change your fate."

"Fate is Never Final."

"I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing."

"Eat, speak, and move, under the influence of the most received star; and though the devil lead the measure such are to be followed."

"My fate cries out, And makes each petty artery in this body As hardy as the Numean lion's nerve."

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."

"O God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolutions of the times Make mountains level, and the continent Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea!"

"What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide."

"If thou read this, O Cæsar, thou mayst live; If not, the Fates with traitors do contrive."

"Fates, we will know your pleasures: That we shall die we know; 'tis but the time And drawing days out, that men stand upon."

"What should be spoken here, where our fate, Hid within an auger-hole, may rush, and seize us?"

"But yet I'll make assurance double sure, And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live."

"But, O vain boast! Who can control his fate?"

"You fools! I and my fellows Are ministers of Fate; the elements Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish One dowle that's in my plume."

"Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe; What is decreed must be, and be this so."

"As the old hermit of Prague … said,… "That that is, is.""

"Let me tell you about my fate: it is an insult. Let me explain it to you: it is a disgrace. Were I to tell my neighbour about my fate, he would heap insults upon me. I looked into the water. My destiny was drifting past. I was born on an ill-fated day."

"Fate is a dog, well able to bite."

"Fate is a raging storm blowing over the Land."

"A pig which was about to be slaughtered by the pig-butcher squealed. (The butcher said:) "Your ancestors and forebears walked this road, and now you too are walking it, so why are you squealing?""

"Fate is a wet bank; it can make one slip."

"Human effort can be used for self-betterment and that there is no such thing as an external fate imposed by the gods."

"Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis."

"Vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta Jam sua: nos alia ex aliis in fata vocamur."

"The Oracle: You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Morpheus' life and in the other hand you'll have your own. One of you is going to die. Which one will be up to you. I'm sorry, kiddo, I really am. You have a good soul, and I hate giving good people bad news. Oh, don't worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll remember you don't believe in any of this fate crap. You're in control of your own life, remember? Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you're done eating it, you'll feel right as rain."

"Wyrd bið ful aræd."

"GaeS a wyrd swa hio scel."

"The bow is bent, the arrow flies, The wingéd shaft of fate."

"Yet who shall shut out Fate?"

"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?"

"Here's a sigh to those who love me, And a smile to those who hate; And whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate."

"To bear is to conquer our fate."

"Le vin est versé, il faut le boire."

"Tolluntur in altum Ut lapsu graviore ruant."

"All human things are subject to decay, And when fate summons, monarchs must obey."

"'Tis Fate that flings the dice, And as she flings Of kings makes peasants, And of peasants kings."

"Stern fate and time Will have their victims; and the best die first, Leaving the bad still strong, though past their prime, To curse the hopeless world they ever curs'd, Vaunting vile deeds, and vainest of the worst."

"On est, quand on veut, maître de son sort."

"One common fate we both must prove; You die with envy, I with love."

"Du musst (herrschen und gewinnen, Oder dienen und verlieren, Leiden oder triumphiren), Amboss oder Hammer sein."

"Der Mensch erfährt, er sei auch wer er mag, Ein letztes Glück und einen letzten Tag."

"Each curs'd his fate that thus their project cross'd; How hard their lot who neither won nor lost."

"Yet, ah! why should they know their fate, Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise."

"Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip."

"Why doth IT so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?"

"'Tis writ on Paradise's gate, "Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!""

"ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων"

"Toil is the lot of all, and bitter woe The fate of many."

"Jove lifts the golden balances that show The fates of mortal men, and things below."

"And not a man appears to tell their fate."

"With equal pace, impartial Fate Knocks at the palace, as the cottage gate."

"Sæpius ventis agitatur ingens Pinus, et celsæ graviore casu Decidunt terres feriuntque summos Fulgura montes."

"East, to the dawn, or west or south or north! Loose rein upon the neck of—and forth!"

"I do not know beneath what sky Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great."

"Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?"

"Even if there were exceedingly few things in a finite space in an infinite time, they would not have to repeat in the same configurations. Suppose there were three wheels of equal size, rotating on the same axis, one point marked on the circumference of each wheel, and these three points lined up in one straight line. If the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first, and if the speed of the third wheel was 1/π of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur."

"Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green, Married to green in all the sweetest flowers— Forget-me-not,—the blue bell,—and, that queen Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great, When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!"

"The karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all. The fate of the cruel must fall also upon all who go out intentionally to kill God's creatures, and call it "sport"."

"Just to save himself a few minutes' trouble, a man does not pay his workmen on the proper day, thinking nothing of the difficulties he brings upon them. So much suffering is caused just by carelessness — by forgetting to think how an action will affect others. But karma never forgets, and it takes no account of the fact that men forget."

"Fate holds the strings, and Men like children move But as they're led: Success is from above."

"Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed."

"No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own."

"A millstone and the human heart are driven ever round, If they have nothing else to grind, they must themselves be ground."

"Kabira wept when he beheld the millstone roll, Of that which passes 'twixt the stones, nought goes forth whole."

"In se magna ruunt: lætis hunc numina rebus Crescendi posuere modum."

"Sed quo fata trahunt, virtus secura sequetur."

"Nulla vis humana vel virtus meruisse unquam potuit, ut, quod præscripsit fatalis ordo, non fiat."

"It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-rul'd by fate."

"Earth loves to gibber o'er her dross, Her golden souls, to waste; The cup she fills for her god-men Is a bitter cup to taste."

"For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee— For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane."

"He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch To gain or lose it all."

"Nullo fata loco possis excludere."

"All the great things of life are swiftly done, Creation, death, and love the double gate. However much we dawdle in the sun We have to hurry at the touch of Fate."

"And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound."

"Fixed, fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute."

"Necessity and chance Approach not me, and what I will is fate."

"The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."

"Big with the fate of Rome."

"Geminos, horoscope, varo Producis genio."

""Thou shalt see me at Philippi," was the remark of the spectre which appeared to Brutus in his tent at Abydos [B.C. 42]. Brutus answered boldly: "I will meet thee there." At Philippi the spectre reappeared, and Brutus, after being defeated, died upon his own sword."

"But blind to former as to future fate, What mortal knows his pre-existent state?"

"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate."

"A brave man struggling in the storms of fate."

"As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come."

"He putteth down one and setteth up another."

"Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns; And as the portals open to receive me, Her voice, in sullen echoes, through the courts, Tells of a nameless deed."

"Sæpe calamitas solatium est nosse sortem suam."

"Der Zug des Herzens ist des Schicksals Stimme."

"Mach deine Rechnung mit dem Himmel, Vogt! Fort musst du, deine Uhr ist abgelaufen."

"Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt."

"Multi ad fatum Venere suum dum fata timent."

"Nemo fit fato nocens."

"Yet what are they, the learned and the great? Awhile of longer wonderment the theme! Who shall presume to prophesy their date, Where nought is certain save the uncertainty of fate?"

"Two shall be born, the whole wide world apart, And speak in different tongues, and have no thought Each of the other's being; and have no heed; And these, o'er unknown seas to unknown lands Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death; And, all unconsciously, shape every act to this one end: That one day out of darkness they shall meet And read life's meanings in each other's eyes."

"Jacta alea esto. (Jacta est alea.)"

"From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea."

"Sometimes an hour of Fate's serenest weather Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams; Somewhere above us, in elusive ether, Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams."

"Ad restim mihi quidem res rediit planissume."

"Dare fatis vela."

"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur."

"Fata viam invenient."

"Perge; decet. Forsan miseros meliora sequentur."

"Fata vocant."

"I saw him even now going the way of all flesh."

"Ah me! what boots us all our boasted power, Our golden treasure, and our purple state. They cannot ward the inevitable hour, Nor stay the fearful violence of fate."

"This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin."

"Blindlings that er blos den Willen des Geschickes."

"Des Schiksals Zwang ist bjtter."

"My fearful trust "en vogant la galère." (Come what may.)"

"Philosophy … consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."

"Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case."

"If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence."

"As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory."

"Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite."

"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."

"(Philosophy is)"

"An art, which has an aim to achieve the beauty, is called a philosophy or in the absolute sense it is named wisdom."

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."

"You cannot be a philosopher. You cannot be one because you are a believer. A Catholic cannot be a philosopher'. So said Ugo Spirito to me one day. And this was the claim of most of the most influential philosophical movements of the century just ended. It was the presumption of those idealists for whom philosophy had among its tasks that of bringing to rational awareness contents embedded in “religious myths”."

"Dario Antiseri, Cristiano perché relativista, relativista perché cristiano. Per un razionalismo della contingenza, Rubbettino Editore, Soveria Mannelli, 2003"

"If … the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications."

"It is necessary therefore that the person who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and politics generally, should have received a good moral training. For our data here are moral judgments, and if a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them. As for him who neither possesses nor can acquire them, let him take to heart the words of Hesiod:"

"‘He is the best of all who thinks for himself in all things. He, too, is good who takes advice from a wiser (person). But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.’"

"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."

"The philosopher as an analyst is not concerned with the physical properties of things, but only with the way in which we speak about them."

"The philosopher is not someone who has thought instead of us but rather someone who makes us think."

"A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion."

"Philosophy only is the true one which reproduces most faithfully the statements of nature, and is written down, as it were, from nature's dictation, so that it is nothing but a copy and a reflection of nature, and adds nothing of its own, but is merely a repetition and echo."

"Philosophy, being nothing but the study of wisdom and truth..."

"Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing."

"The whole question of phenomena rests on the correct comprehension of old philosophies. Whither, then, should we turn, in our perplexity, but to the ancient sages, since, on the pretext of superstition, we are refused an explanation by the modern? Let us ask them what they know of genuine science and religion; not in the matter of mere details, but in all the broad conception of these twin truths — so strong in their unity, so weak when divided. Besides, we may find our profit in comparing this boasted modern science with ancient ignorance; this improved modern theology with the "Secret doctrines" of the ancient universal religion. Perhaps we may thus discover a neutral ground whence we can reach and profit by both. It is the Platonic philosophy, the most elaborate compend of the abstruse systems of old India, that can alone afford us this middle ground."

"Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the nous, spirit, or rational soul of man, being “ generated by the Divine Father,” possessed a nature kindred, or even homogeneous, with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities. This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone j the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by philosophy—the love of wisdom. The love of truth is inherently the love of good ; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God.“ This flight,” says Plato in the Theeetetus, “ consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom.”"

"There was not a philosopher of any notoriety who did not hold to this doctrine of metempsychosis, as taught by the Brahmans, Buddhists, and later by the Pythagoreans, in its esoteric sense, whether he expressed it more or less intelligibly. Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, Synesius and Chalcidius, all believed in it; and the Gnostics, who are unhesitatingly proclaimed by history as a body of the most refined, learned, and enlightened men, were all believers in metempsychosis. Socrates entertained opinions identical with those of Pythagoras; and both, as the penalty of their divine philosophy, were put to a violent death. The rabble has been the same in all ages. Materialism has been, and will ever be blind to spiritual truths. These philosophers held, with the Hindus, that God had infused into matter a portion of his own Divine Spirit, which animates and moves every particle."

"The philosopher wants to know things as they are. He loves the truth. That is an intellectual virtue. He does not love to tell the truth. That is a moral virtue. Presumably he would prefer not to practice deception; but if it is a condition of his survival, he has no objection to it. The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one’s thought."

"Art shows how it loves, philosophy what it loves; mysticism knows only that it loves."

"Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it … or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings&mdash;that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."

"Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch’s ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels—but alas! We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams, By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth."

"Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev’ry text and gloss over Whate’er the crabbed’st author hath, He understood b’ implicit faith."

"Before Philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded."

"Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer."

"In Hindustan, as in England, there are doctrines for the learned, and dogmas for the unlearned; strong meat for men & milk for babes; facts for the few, & fictions for the many, realities for the wise, and romances for the simple; esoteric truth for the philosopher, & exoteric fable for the fool."

"O vitæ philosophia dux! O virtutis indagatrix, expultrixque vitiorum! Quid non modo nos, sed omnino vita hominum sine et esse potuisset? Tu urbes peperisti; tu dissipatos homines in societatum vitæ convocasti."

"The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one."

"In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission."

"There exists a definite misunderstanding between scientists and philosophers; a misunderstanding which might easily have been avoided had philosophers possessed a proper realisation of their inevitable limitations when discussing scientific matters."

"The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the represser’s role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought—but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking."

"The first step towards philosophy is incredulity."

"The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless this universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are of the form of the human body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them and put them in a servicable condition."

"The Beginning of Philosophy is a Consciousness of your own Weakness and inability in necessary things."

"Luxurious food and drinks, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural, is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters, and baths, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy."

"Philosophy instructs us to pay homage to the gods, not through hope or fear, but from veneration of Their superior nature. It moreover enables us to conquer the fear of death, by teaching us that it is no proper object of terror; since, whilst we are, death is not, and when death arrives, we are not: so that it neither concerns the living nor the dead."

"Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it."

"When I arrived at college, I immediately took philosophy... Nothing was ever answered. I decided that "Why" questions are simply too deep to be answered with a frontal attack, using the sloppy weapon of human language."

"To theology, … only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred."

"The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger!"

"Every other art,—as poetry, music, painting,—may be practised without the process showing forth the rules according to which it is conducted;—but in the self-cognizant art of the philosopher, no step can be taken without declaring the grounds upon which it proceeds."

"Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve."

"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?"

"Many philosophers and many departments simply ignore arguments for greater diversity; others respond with arguments for Eurocentrism that we and many others have refuted elsewhere. The profession as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric. It therefore seems futile to rehearse arguments for greater diversity one more time, however compelling we find them.Instead, we ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness. We therefore suggest that any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American Philosophy.”"

"A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject."

"Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That of which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak."

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers."

"This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey."

"The true philosophy is rhetoric, and the true rhetoric is philosophy, a philosophy which does not need an “external” rhetoric to convince, and a rhetoric that does not need an “external” content of verity."

"We may get some idea of the change in perspective that may occur in our reading and interpretation of the philosophical works of antiquity when we consider them from the point of view of the practice of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … they consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity."

"With the advent of medieval Scholasticism, … we find a clear distinction between theologia and philosophia. Theology became conscious of its autonomy qua supreme science, which philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises, which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics. Reduced to the rank of a “handmaid of theology,” philosophy’s role was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical—material. When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from this medieval conception. In particular, it maintained its purely theoretical character, which even evolved in the direction of a more and more thorough systemization. Not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy consciously return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world."

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists."

"A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher."

"'You only think you are barnpots,' shouted angry farmers from the meadows. 'Shut that row up! You're frightening the chickens, you lot and your bloody philosophy. You can't eat philosophy can you? Where would you be if us farmers went round spouting statements like that, eh? Dead, that's where you'd be! Because there'd be naff all to eat!"

"Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event."

"Philosophy is that which grasps its own era in thought."

"Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy."

"In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world."

"Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology."

"I found a certain Boldness of Temper, growing in me, which was not enclin'd to submit to any Authority in these Subjects, but led me to seek out some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht. After much Study, & Reflection on this, at last, when I was about 18 Years of Age, there seem'd to be open'd up to me a new Scene of Thought, which transported me beyond Measure, & made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it."

"Pythagoras is said to have been the first to call himself a philosopher, a word which heretofore had not been an appellation, but a description. He likened the entrance of men into the present life to the progression of a crowd to some public spectacle. There assemble men of all descriptions and views. One hastens to sell his wares for money and gain; another exhibits his bodily strength for renown; but the most liberal assemble to observe the landscape, the beautiful works of art, the specimens of valor, and the customary literary productions. So also in the present life men of manifold pursuits are assembled. Some are incensed by the desire of riches and luxury; others by the love of power and dominion, or by insane ambition for glory. But the purest and most genuine character is that of the man who devotes himself to the contemplation of the most beautiful things; and he may properly be called a philosopher."

"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way."

"I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ...I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy... but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism... gave... lectures... with that very word in its title,—flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us... understood all that he said—yet here I stand making a very similar venture. ...There is... a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness."

"The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question."

"To philosophise is to learn to die – philosophising is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being."

"Physics and philosophy are at most a few thousand years old, but probably have lives of thousands of millions of years stretching away in front of them. They are only just beginning to get under way."

"Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself."

"the human being is by nature a philosopher"

"philosophy must obey its own rules and be based upon its own principles; truth, however, can only be one."

"Empirical popular knowledge, usually termed ‘common sense’, had been dismissed contemptuously by Bertrand Russell as ‘the metaphysics of savages’. But if academic philosophers thought the world was peopled by fools, most made little or no attempt to enlighten them on the great issues of the day, and even Russell, who wrote on such matters, drew an absolute distinction between his popular journalism and his ‘serious’ work. The negative and destructive nature of twentieth-century philosophy, its obsession with the inadequacies and failures of language, above all its failure to address itself to the immense problems confronting humanity, was a source of shame to the few who tried to grapple with them, notably Karl Popper: ‘I cannot say that I am proud of being called a philosopher,’ he wrote."

"Too much philosophy makes men mad."

"If it does not upset, it is not philosophy."

"Much can be left unstated. But if nothing is discredited, it is not philosophy."

"What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see."

"Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us -- but not suckle us."

"It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards."

"The spheres with which philosophy properly has to deal, the spheres proper to thought, are logic, nature, and history. Here necessity rules and therefore mediation has its validity. That this is true of logic and nature, no one will deny, but with history there is a difficulty, for here, it is said, freedom prevails. But I think that history is incorrectly interpreted and that the difficulty arises from the following: History, namely, is more than a product of the free actions of free individuals. The individual acts, but his action enters into the order of things that maintains the whole of existence. What is going to come of his action, one who acts does not really know. But this higher order of things that digests, so to speak, the free actions and works them together in its eternal laws is necessity, and this necessity is the movement of world history; it is therefore quite proper for philosophy to use mediation-that is, relative mediation. If I am contemplating a world-historical individuality, I can then distinguish between the deeds of which Scripture says “they follow him” and the deeds by which he belongs to history. Philosophy has nothing to do with what could be called the inner deed, but the inner deed is the true life of freedom. Philosophy considers the external deed, yet in turn it does not see this as isolated but sees it as assimilated into and transformed in the world-historical process. This process is the proper subject for philosophy and it considers this under the category of necessity. Therefore it reject the reflection that wants to point out that everything could be otherwise; it views world-history in such a way that there is no question of an either/or."

"If philosophy among other vagaries were also to have the notion that it could occur to a man to act in accordance with its teaching, one might make out of that a queer comedy."

"The sum of his doctrine concerning philosophy, in general, is this: Philosophy is the exercise of reason in the pursuit and attainment of a happy life; whence it follows, that those studies which conduce neither to the acquisition nor the enjoyment of happiness are to be dismissed as of no value. The end of all speculation ought to be, to enable men to judge with certainty what is to be chosen, and what to be avoided, to preserve themselves free from pain, and to secure health of body, and tranquillity of mind. True philosophy is so useful to every man, that the young should apply to it without delay, and the old should never be weary of the pursuit; for no man is either too young or too old to correct and improve his mind, and to study the art of happiness. Happy are they who possess by nature a free and vigorous intellect, and who are born in a country where they can prosecute their inquiries without restraint: for it is philosophy alone which raises a man above vain fears and base passions, and gives him the perfect command of himself."

"As nothing ought to be dearer to a philosopher than truth, he should, pursue it by the most direct means, devising no actions himself, nor suffering himself to be imposed upon by the fictions of others, neither poets, orators, nor logicians, making no other use of the rules of rhetoric or grammar, than to enable him to speak or write with accuracy and perspicuity, and always preferring a plain and simple to an ornamented style. Whilst some doubt of everything, and others profess to acknowledge everything, a wise man will embrace such tenets, and only such as are built upon experience, or upon certain and indisputable axioms."

"Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding."

"Philosophy, like charity, begins at home ; but also, like charity, I should wish it to extend, and become the more beneficial the more it expands."

"Never was there a greater need for the diffusion of knowledge, for in the present ignorance of men there is a very real and imminent danger. We have in the immediate future the possibility of serious struggle; we have all the elements of a possible social upheaval, and we have no religion with sufficient hold upon the people to check what may develop into a wild and dangerous movement. As yet philosophy is the study of the very few only, and the science which has done so much for us, and has achieved so many triumphs, cannot stay the danger which threatens us. The only thing that can prevent it is the diffusion of knowledge, so that men shall understand what is really best for them and shall realize that nothing can ever be good for one which is against the interests of the whole. p. 333"

"Philosophy is the misuse of a terminology which was invented for just this purpose."

"We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true."

"Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner."

"Regard for the true endeavor of philosophy, that of guiding into one common stream the many rills of knowledge, will not be found wanting in my work, although it takes a determined stand against the encroachments of metaphysical methods."

"You feared the force of custom, the ascendancy of authority, the illusions of the imagination. None of these things are left; there are no more customs, there are no more masters, each man's mind is his own. Philosophy having corroded the cement that united men, there are no longer any moral bonds."

"I believe that in actual fact philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences and that all method and exactness serve its intuitions and its intellectual and historical will. In the last analysis it is always a matter of the quod erat demonstrandum. Scientific freedom from assumptions is or should be a moral fact. But intellectually it is, as Freud points out, probably an illusion. One might strain the point and say that science has never made a discovery without being authorized and encouraged by philosophy."

"The philosopher … subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment—namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society."

"Philosophy is the science by which the natural light of reason studies the first causes or highest principles of all things – is, in other words, the science of things in their first causes, in so far as these belong to the natural order."

"Half of good philosophy is good grammar."

"Philosophy is an interpretation of the world in order to change it."

"Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern."

"Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love."

"Theology is to-day recognised to be the instrument of myth, philosophy to be the instrument of science."

"What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement."

"Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution."

"How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo’s lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns."

"That stone, Philosophers in vain so long have sought."

"Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding."

"The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, "What is time?" A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, "What is a number?" A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes a word mean anything?" Anyone can ask whether it's wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes an action right or wrong?""

"For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first diligently to investigate the properties of things and establish them by experiment, and then later seek hypotheses to explain them. For hypotheses ought to be fitted merely to explain the properties of things and not to predetermine them [the hypotheses] except so far as they can be an aid to experiments. If any one offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see how anything certain can be determined in any science; for it is always possible to contrive hypotheses, one after another, which are found rich in new tribulations. Wherefore I judged that one should abstain from considering hypotheses as from a fallacious argument, and that the force of their argument must be removed, that one may arrive at a maturer and more general explanation."

"Jetzt wage ich es, der Weisheit selber nachzugehen und selber Philosoph zu sein; früher verehrte ich die Philosophen."

"Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart."

"[Philosophers] are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of “inspiration”—most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract—that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact."

"To grasp the limits of reason &ndash; only this is truly philosophy."

"What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.”"

"Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights."

"The philosopher must be above all a free man, and not a slave of the passions."

"The evaluation of one's own social circumstance is part of the analysis of facts and events, and this kind of evaluation is, I feel, as good a starting point of the inquiry into the relations between philosophy and society as any other. Philosophy, in understanding human society, call for an analysis of facts and events, and an attempt to see how they fit into human life, and so how they make up human experience. In this way, philosophy, like history, can come to enrich, indeed to define, the experience of man."

"The possibility of all philosophy ... namely, that the intelligence, by affecting itself, gives itself a movement in accordance with its own law—that is, gives itself a form of activity all its own."

"Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?"

"Se moquer de la philosophie c’est vraiment philosophe."

"The realist, then, would seek in behalf of philosophy the same renunciation the same rigour of procedure, that has been achieved in science. This does not mean that he would reduce philosophy to natural or physical science. He recognizes that the philosopher has undertaken certain peculiar problems, and that he must apply himself to these, with whatever method he may find it necessary to employ. It remains the business of the philosopher to attempt a wide synoptic survey of the world, to raise underlying and ulterior questions, and in particular to examine the cognitive and moral processes. And it is quite true that for the present no technique at all comparable with that of the exact sciences is to be expected. But where such technique is attainable, as for example in symbolic logic, the realist welcomes it. And for the rest he limits himself to a more modest aspiration. He hopes that philosophers may come like scientists to speak a common language, to formulate common problems and to appeal to a common realm of fact for their resolution. Above all he desires to get rid of the philosophical monologue, and of the lyric and impressionistic mode of philosophizing. And in all this he is prompted not by the will to destroy but by the hope that philosophy is a kind of knowledge, and neither a song nor a prayer nor a dream. He proposes, therefore, to rely less on inspiration and more on observation and analysis. He conceives his function to be in the last analysis the same as that of the scientist. There is a world out yonder more or less shrouded in darkness, and it is important, if possible, to light it up. But instead of, like the scientist, focussing the mind's rays and throwing this or that portion of the world into brilliant relief, he attempts to bring to light the outlines and contour of the whole, realizing too well that in diffusing so widely what little light he has, he will provide only a very dim illumination."

"Philosophia non sapientiam, sed amorem sapientie pollicetur."

"Modo verus amor sit et vera quam ames sapientia, philosophus verus eris."

"I address all these complaints ... against the philosophers who believe and assert that philosophy should not be pursued because no monetary value or reward is assigned it, unmindful that by this sign they disqualify themselves as philosophers. Since their whole life is concentrated on gain and ambition, they never embrace the knowledge of the truth for its own sake."

"I have never philosophized save for the sake of philosophy, nor have I ever desired or hoped to secure from my studies and my laborious researches any profit or fruit save cultivation of mind and knowledge of the truth."

"Philosophy is the acquisition of knowledge."

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

"Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen and been satisfied of the madness of the multitude, and known that there is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of States, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just. Such a saviour would be like a man who has fallen among wild beasts—unable to join in the wickedness of his fellows, neither would he be able alone to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and would have to throw away his life before he had done any good to himself or others. And he reflects upon all this, and holds his peace, and does his own business. He is like one who retires under the shelter of a wall in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along; and when he sees the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good will, with bright hopes."

"The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism."

"In the realm of philosophy, ... it is extraordinary how much weight is attached to fashion in a province where the mind ought to be free and independent, anxious only to arrive at the truth, and bowing to the authority of none but proved masters."

"Most definitions of philosophy are fairly controversial, particularly if they aim to be at all interesting or profound. That is partly because what has been called philosophy has changed radically in scope in the course of history, with many inquiries that were originally part of it having detached themselves from it. The shortest definition, and it is quite a good one, is that philosophy is thinking about thinking. That brings out the generally second-order character of the subject, as reflective thought about particular kinds of thinking — formation of beliefs, claims to knowledge — about the world or large parts of it. A more detailed, but still uncontroversial comprehensive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of existence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value). Each of these three elements..."

"Well, for me, it's clarification of the nature of the world, the nature of reality. I seek the same satisfaction that one looks for in science in general, in theoretical science."

"Philosophy is not to relieve one of decisions, but to confront him with decisions. It is to make life not easy but, on the contrary, problematical."

"In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is – i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts – i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance."

"'Philosophy' is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain."

"Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars."

"[On the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools] In France and Spain, where it has been almost eliminated from secondary schools, they have regretted it. In Germany, there is no possibility of an intermediate level of knowledge. A philosopher like Gadamer is much better understood in Italy than in Germany. He once told me that when he came here he felt like he was in a sanctuary: all those young people who came to hear him had tools of understanding that no other country had."

"Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business."

"Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life."

"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good."

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

"When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid."

"Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries."

"Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know."

"Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars."

"Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative."

"The philosopher places himself at the summit of thought; from there he views what the world has been and what it must become. He is not just an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the highest kind in a moral world because it is his opinion of what the world must become that regulates society."

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

"Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself."

"Über keinen Gegenstand philosophieren sie seltner als über die Philosophie."

"Philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem."

"Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist."

"A man becomes a philosopher by reason of a certain perplexity, from which he seeks to free himself."

"To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a φίλαυτος [lover of self], not a φιλόσοφος [lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one’s whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth."

"University professors, restricted in this way, are quite happy about the matter, for their real concern is to earn with credit an honest livelihood for themselves and also for their wives and children and moreover to enjoy a certain prestige in the eyes of the public. On the other hand, the deeply stirred mind of the real philosopher, whose whole concern in to look for the key to our existence, as mysterious as it is precarious, is regarded by them as something mythological, if indeed the man so affected does not even appear to them to be obsessed by a monomania, should he ever be met with among them. For that a man could really be in dead earnest about philosophy does not as a rule occur to anyone, least of all to a lecturer thereon."

"The philosophical author is the leader, his reader the wanderer. If they are to arrive together, they must above all start out together; in other words, the author must take up his reader at a standpoint which they undoubtedly have in common. This, however, can be none other than that of empirical consciousness that is common to us all. Let him, therefore, take him firmly by the hand and see how high above the clouds he can reach, step by step on the mountain path."

"To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy."

"It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’ Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God’s sake, not to inquire further."

"Philosophy is nothing but Discretion."

"Philosophy is no trick to catch the public; it is not devised for show. It is a matter, not of words, but of facts. It is not pursued in order that the day may yield some amusement before it is spent, or that our leisure may be relieved of a tedium that irks us. It molds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone; it sits at the helm and directs our course as we waver amid uncertainties. Without it, no one can live fearlessly or in peace of mind. Countless things that happen every hour call for advice; and such advice is to be sought in philosophy."

"It is probable that those who seek after anything whatever, will either find it as they continue the search, will deny that it can be found and confess it to be out of reach, or will go on seeking it. Some have said, accordingly, in regard to the things sought in philosophy, that they have found the truth, while others have declared it impossible to find, and still others continue to seek it. Those who think that they have found it are those who are especially called Dogmatics, as for example, the Schools of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics and some others. Those who have declared it impossible to find are Clitomachus, Carneades, with their respective followers, and other Academicians. Those who still seek it are the Sceptics. It appears therefore, reasonable to conclude that the three principal kinds of philosophy are the Dogmatic, the Academic, and the Sceptic."

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy."

"The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer."

"There is a school of Philosophy still in existence of which modern culture has lost sight. Glimpses of it are discernible in the ancient philosophies with which all educated men are familiar, but these are hardly more intelligible than fragments of forgotten sculpture,-less so, for we comprehend the human form, and can give imaginary limbs to a torso; but we can give no imaginary meaning to the truth coming down to us from Plato or Pythagoras, pointing, for those who hold the clue to their significance, to the secret knowledge of the ancient world. Side lights, nevertheless, may enable us to decipher such language, and a very rich intellectual reward offers itself to persons who are willing to attempt the investigation."

"For, strange as the statement will appear at first sight, modern metaphysics, and to a large extent modern physical science, have been groping for centuries blindly after knowledge which occult philosophy has enjoyed in full measure all the while. Owing to a train of fortunate circumstances, I have come to know that this is the case; I have come into some contact with persons who are heirs of a greater knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature and humanity than modern culture has yet evolved; and my present wish is to sketch the outlines of this knowledge, to record with exactitude the experimental proofs I have obtained that occult science invest its adepts with a control of natural forces superior to that enjoyed by physicists of the ordinary type, and the grounds there are for bestowing the most respectful consideration on the theories entertained by occult science concerning the constitution and destinies of the human soul."

"People in the present day will be slow to believe that any knowledge worth considering can be found outside the bright focus of Western culture. Modern science has accomplished grand results by the open method of investigation, and is very impatient of the theory that persons who ever attained to real knowledge, either in sciences or metaphysics, could have been content to hide their light under a bushel. So the tendency has been to conceive that occult philosophers of old- Egyptian priests, Chaldean Magi, Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-Platonists, and the rest-who kept their knowledge secret, must have adopted that policy to conceal the fact that they knew very little. Mystery can only have been loved by charlatans who wished to mystify. The conclusion is pardonable from the modern point of view, but it has given rise to an impression in the popular mind that the ancient mystics have actually been turned inside out, and found to know very little. This impression is absolutely erroneous."

"It was pretty cool to know that someone else was wondering about all the shit I was wondering about even two thousand years ago—even though it made me a bit sad to realize that meant nobody had figured anything out in all of that time."

"It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists."

"Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm."

"This is not philosophy, this is reality. Will you please keep in mind what’s going on!"

"A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it."

"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men."

"A philosopher who had made philosophy his speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in his philosophy, …"

"Philosophy in the strong, classical sense shares with religion the object, truth, the Absolute in and of itself, and is therefore properly a stripping away, a removal of everything that is relative and accidental, in order to get to the essential. This concerns first and foremost ourselves, according to the precept of the Delphic Apollo: ‘Know thyself’. It is the ‘sculpting of one's own statue’ that Plotinus speaks of, removing the marble that covers it and prevents it from coming to light"

"La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes."

"The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out."

"Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life."

"The theory of Karma is that we suffer for our good or bad deeds, and the whole scope of philosophy is to approach the glory of man. All the Scriptures sing the glory of man, of the soul, and then, with the same breath, they preach this Karma. A good deed brings such a result, and a bad deed such a result, but, if the soul can be acted upon by a good or a bad deed it amounts to nothing. Bad deeds put a bart to the manifestation of our nature, of the Purusa (soul), and good deeds take the obstacles off, and its glory becomes manifest. But the Purusa itself is never changed. Whatever you do never destroys your own glory, your own nature, because the soul cannot be acted upon by anything, only a veil is spread before it, hiding its perfection. Chapter 4, Sutra 4."

"Philosophy is an activity: it is a way of thinking about certain sorts of question. Its most distinctive feature is its use of logical argument. Philosophers typically deal in arguments: they either invent them, criticize other people’s, or do both. They also analyse and clarify concepts."

"Shouldn't I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn't I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not."

"I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a philosopher simply do not have a day job to go to."

"When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason."

"Miracles in mysticism don't occupy such an important place. It's metaphor, for the peasants, for the crowds, to impress people. What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically. You plunge into it. Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth."

"Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)"

"Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it. Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 175"

"People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 185"

"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question."

"In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last."

"Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?"

"The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift, That no philosophy can lift."

"Why should not grave Philosophy be styled? Herself, a dreamer of a kindred stock, A dreamer, yet more spiritless and dull?"

"When we see a woman bartering beauty for gold, we look upon such a one as no other than a common prostitute; but she who rewards the passion of some worthy youth with it, gains at the same time our approbation and esteem. It is the very same with philosophy: he who sets it forth for public sale, to be disposed of to the highest bidder, is a sophist, a public prostitute."

"What characterizes philosophy is this "step back" from actuality into possibility — the attitude best rendered by Adorno's and Horkheimer's motto quoted by Fredric Jameson: "Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists.""

"Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex. The new men entering life today are as naked and fearless as children; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, ask “Why?” and “What next?” Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise—because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma."

"Prima sapientiae clavis definitur, assidua scilicet seu frequens interrogatio … Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem venimus; inquirendo veritatem percipimus."

"Wisdom is not absolute autocracy and independence of the soul, but obedience and subordination of the soul to higher things, through which it acquires the ability to dominate and subordinate lower things. Only in this way does it become subordinate and mistress. “'Servire Deo libertas est”'. Humility and freedom are equally necessary."

"It is necessary therefore that the person who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and politics generally, should have received a good moral training. For our data here are moral judgments, and if a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them. As for him who neither possesses nor can acquire them, let him take to heart the words of Hesiod:"

"‘ He is the best of all who thinks for himself in all things."

"He, too, is good who takes advice from a wiser (person)."

"But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.’"