"“Don’t you see?” They did not see. This is the way things were done. Things were done this way. Things weren’t done another way. You did things the way you did things. You didn’t do things the way you didn’t do things."

"Recall the instructor at the Academy: “What is Man, young aspirants? Man is an animal that trades…”"

"I can tell you that only a fool destroys useful things merely because he doesn’t like them."

"It is not in the nature of any people that it should willingly endure being ruled by another people, whether it is ruled ill or ruled well."

"“The fact that you know the questions,” he said, a mite grudgingly, “tends to make me think you might really know the answers.”"

"“Follow me, men! I’m right behind you!”"

"A querulous whine that was almost a question was succeeded by a deep gobble that was almost an answer."

"Experience may be a bitter teacher, but She is a good one."

"The instructor-Na has observed in the Na 14 tendencies toward an archaic and dangerous quality to which the ancients gave the name personal ambition."

"Life continued, the wheel turned, the earth moved, and even death—that delightful biological necessity—was an aspect of life."

"“How is your new woman? Your new-est one, I sh’d say.” Jack shrugged. “Good enough. They all got the same thing.” “Yeh-es,” Jeff nodded, judiciously. “But some of ’m’s got more of it than others.”"

"Tell him you’ll pay any fine within reason. That dragon-cod can’t even read his own name unless it’s written in gold ink."

"There was an inn...which kept no register of...a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase."

"He who has slain one, will he abstain from slaying many?"

"The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed."

"In general I find little girls enchanting. What a shame they grow up to be big girls and make our lives as miserable as we allow them, and oft-times more."

"Bloodgood Bixbee knew nothing about art, but he knew what he didn’t like."

"The short man was all of a piece, but there was nothing reassuring in this; it was a piece of the same material that too many high school principals, boys’ camp directors, and military and naval officers are made of: a texture or quality often dignified by the description, “ability to command”—the desire to bully, override, bear down—the capacity to do so by virtue of office—the habit of having done so for a long time and the confidence of continuing to do so for a long time."

"Things were seldom what they seemed. People feared to tempt powers spiritual or temporal or illegal by displays of well being, and the brick screens in from of (or behind, depending on whether one were going in or going out) the doors blocked both the gaze of the curious and the path of demons. Demons can travel only in straight lines; it is the sons of men whose ways are devious."

"Well, rather an ague than a pox. A pox is something one wishes on editors…strange breed, editors. The females all have names like Lulu Ammabelle Smith or Minnie Lundquist Bloom, and the males have little horns growing out of their brows."

"Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them."

"When the records of our civilization are balanced, then—but perhaps not before—the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache."

"Sorcery works against Nature, magic works with it."

"“A conscientious and diligent scientist—” “—must remain a continual student,” a deep voice finished the quotation."

"These precautions, perhaps because they had been taken, proved unnecessary."

"And then in that, admittedly magnificent, abrupt moment you saw what I concede without argument was the face of rather an attractive wench, and—Zeus! you weren’t thinking, man—you were simply reacting. It wasn’t your heart, it was your codpiece that the impulse came from!"

"Though you expel Nature with a pitchfork, she will always return."

"The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative."

"That existence has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by saying No to create a world."

"One does wish that Sartre would pause for a while to regroup his forces. The man really does write too much."

"Heidegger's philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent."

"The anguish of loss may be redeemed, but can never be mediated."

"Nietzsche's life has all the characteristics of a psychological fatality."

"Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question."

"Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself."

"The instincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense it whenever the approach of logic threatens them."

"Poets are witnesses to Being before the philosophers are able to bring it into thought."

"The will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human personality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become."

"Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and this shift is decisive."

"As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people."

"Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning."

"Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man."

"The peasantry are wiser in their ignorance than the savants of St Petersburg in their learning."

"Journalism has become a great god of the period, and gods have a way of ruthlessly and demonically taking over their servitors."

"Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society."

"A recognition of limits, of boundaries, may be the only thing that prevents power from dizzy collapse."

"Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth."

"We do not ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are that have brought us into this danger; we do not search for the human face behind the bewildering array of instruments that man has forged; in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical."