Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.
From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.
Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.
Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity to further one and discourage the other.
A man may live long, and die at last in ignorance of many truths, which his mind was capable of knowing, and that with certainty.
We are under God's power, and we can do nothing but by the power of God, and woe shall hereafter be to us if we abuse this power.
Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
I have learned more from Hayek than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski - but not even excepting Russell.
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.
By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love and kindness he may rule the world forever.
Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.
Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult; make something big by starting with it when small.
Western civilization is based upon the libertarian principle, and all its achievements are the results of the action of free men.
I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.
True glory strikes root, and even extends itself; all false pretensions fall as do flowers, nor can any feigned thing be lasting.
According to the law of nature it is only fair that no one should become richer through damages and injuries suffered by another.
No one sees what is before his feet: we all gaze at the stars. [Lat., Quod est ante pedes nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas.]
Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defence can actually be just.
Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.
Nothing is so swift as calumny, nothing is more easily propagated, nothing more readily credited, nothing more widely circulated.
The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.
Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was.
No man was ever lost except for one reason: having once left his ground he has let himself become too permanently settled abroad.
Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.
If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.
Without effective protection of the citizens' right to property, it will be difficult to attract and accumulate valuable capital.
I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.
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?
Even if one is not hungry and although eat is called HumanBeing Even though one is hungry and although does not eat is HumanBeing
All religion may be centered around a generally good idea, however, this has not stopped its adherents from acting like bastards.
Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion.
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
To escape from evil we must be made as far as possible like God; and the resemblance consists in becoming just and holy and wise.
Wealth and poverty; one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.
A delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!
He that condescended so far, and stooped so low, to invite and bring us to heaven, will not refuse us a gracious reception there.
A philosopher who says, 'There are no truths, only interpretations,' risks the retort: 'Is that true, or only an interpretation?'
The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.