"Even Gandhi, with all his charisma, did not "melt the hearts" of his oppressors, as he had hoped. After softening, hearts harden again. Asoka too was wrong to think that he was changing the course of history, and that his righteousness would last "as long as the sun and the moon.""

"The temptation before 1933 was to believe in Hitler as a savior, to believe in a national rebirth. The path to National Socialism led through a wasteland of personal fears, collective anxiety, and resentments. The temptation was to surrender oneself to a dictator, to believe in a miracle. Hitler evoked human will and divine providence. The religious-mystical element in National Socialism was uncannily appealing to unpolitical people, to unrealistic people at odds with their world and accustomed perhaps to the dream of heroic irrationalism. The temptation was to abandon oneself to national delirium— despite (or even because of) the threat of violence."

"The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born."

"The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them."

"However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction."

"John Langshaw Austin... made a number of contributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work on knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the use of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin draws in his work on speech acts — in particular his distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts — have assumed something like canonical status in more recent work. His work on knowledge and perception places him in a broad tradition of “Oxford Realism”, running from Cook Wilson and Harold Arthur Prichard through to J. M. Hinton, M. G. F. Martin, John McDowell, Paul Snowdon, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. His work on truth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent to which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of truth-conditions."

"Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us."

"Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers."

"Like "real", "free" is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As "truth" is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so "freedom" is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed."

"We become obsessed with "truth" when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with "freedom" when discussing conduct...Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal."

"But suppose we take the noun "truth": here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation."

"If we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk?"

"Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination."

"Faced with the nonsense question "What is the meaning of a word?" and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up."

"It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence."

"But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense "red" and "blue" any more than "resemblance" (or "qualities" any more than "relations"): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that "this is red.""

"In one sense "there are" both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder."

"Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?"

"The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means ... and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of "good"."

"There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in butter; but this is the sort of thing (as the proverb indicates) we overlook: there are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely."

"Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts."

"We speak of people "taking refuge" in vagueness — the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough."

"Sentences are not as such either true or false."

"Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with "motive" or "impulse", but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity."

"'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

"Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word."

"But I know, my friends, that you may object to me what St. Irenaeus says."

"It will lead to nothing, I fear, sir"

"I think sir, since you care for the advice of an old man, sir, you will find it a very good practise, always to verify your references, sir!"

"Wait, sir, until I am gone!"

"What young woman is not, more or less, a mirror?"

"Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

"Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait."

"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."

"Courage, mon ami, le diable est mort! / Take courage, my friend, the devil is dead!"

"The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds they were not worth so much trouble."

"Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn't it?"

"...even Christians loved one another at first starting."

"Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows."

"Art is not imitation but illusion."

"It must be confessed that a sort of halo of personal grandeur surrounds a great actress."

"In players, vanity cripples art at every step."

"First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction"

"Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all--as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens."