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Quotations

"The wise discovered in their hearts
The bond of Being to Non-being.
Whence is this creation?
Is it founded or not?
The presiding Deity in the skies knows it,
Or perhaps He does not."
- Nasadiya Hymn Rigveda

"A slave is he who cannot speak his thought." - Euripides

"The form of government, when it has been prudently established, produces citizens distinguished for bravery, justice, and every other good quality; whereas, on the other hand, bad institutions render men cowardly, rapacious, and slaves of every foul desire." - Dionysius of Halicarnassus

"For love of money is the disease which renders us most pitiful and grovelling, and love of pleasure is that which renders us most despicable." - Longinus

"When Anacharsis heard what Solon was doing, he laughed at the folly of thinking that he could restrain the unjust proceedings and avarice of his citizens by written laws, which, he said, resembled in every way spiders' webs, and would, like them, catch and hold only the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful would easily break through them." - Plutarch

"Nor ought we ever to allow any growing power to acquire such a degree of strength as to be able to tear from us, without resistance, our natural, undisputed rights." - Polybius

"No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good." - Cicero

"No barriers, no masses of matter, however enormous, can withstand the powers of the mind; the remotest corners yield to them; all things succumb, the very heaven itself is laid open." - Manilius

"There is wonderful unanimity among the dissolute." - Juvenal

"As far as the stars are from the earth, and as different as fire is from water, so much do self-interest and integrity differ." - Lucan

"To wish for death is a coward’s part." - Ovid

"How utter, utter is the dearth of men who venture down into their own breasts, and how universally they stare at the wallet on the back of the man before them." - Virgil

"But life is a warfare." - Seneca

"We become wiser by adversity, prosperity destroys the idea of what is right." - Seneca

"To be able to endure odium, is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power." - Seneca

"In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course." - Tacitus

"When the state is most corrupt, the laws are most numerous." - Tacitus

"The wicked find it easier to coalesce for seditious purposes than for concord in peace." - Tacitus

"To rob, to ravage, and to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace." - Tacitus

"A small state increases by concord; the greatest falls gradually to ruin by dissension." - Sallust

"Envy, like flames, soars upwards." - Livy

"We move through the world in a narrow groove, preoccupied with the petty things we see and hear, brooding over our prejudices, passing by the joys of life without even knowing that we have missed anything. Never for a moment do we taste the heady wine of freedom." - Yang Chu

"In this immeasurable and absolute elevation of soul, forgetting all created things and liberated from them, thou shalt rise above thyself and beyond all creation to find thyself within the shaft of light that flashes out from the divine, mysterious darkness." - St. Bonaventure

"When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point." - Blaise Pascal

"The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice." - Blaise Pascal

"It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away." - Blaise Pascal

"Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism." - Blaise Pascal

"Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul..." - Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz

"There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies, and souls - in the least part of matter.... Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance." - Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz

"[Political] Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise." - Giambattista Vico

"Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed." - Giambattista Vico

"It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of maturer age are already sunk into corruption." - Baron de Montesquieu

"Another bad effect of commerce is that the minds of men are contracted, and tendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished." - Adam Smith

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master." - George Washington

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson

"A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men." - Thomas Paine

"The origin of society, then, is to be sought, not in any natural right which one man has to exercise authority over another, but in the united consent of those who associate." - Brutus (Antifederalist No. 84)

"Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves." - Johann von Goethe

"A man who cannot command himself will always be a slave." - Johann von Goethe

"When once I, [Care], have taken possession of a man, the whole world is of no avail to him: down on him comes perpetual darkness, the sun never rises and never sets; his outward senses are unimpaired, but night has nested in his soul, and though he may be surrounded by treasures he can make none of them his own. His happiness and unhappiness hang on whims, he starves amid abundance, he procrastinates pleasure and procrastinates toil; he looks to nothing but the future, and thus he can never have done with anything. Shall he come or shall he go? He has lost the power to decide; in the middle of an open road he gropes with hesitant half-steps. He wanders ever deeper into the maze, sees all things more and more distortedly, is a burden to himself and to others; he chokes as he draws breath, and though not choked to death he is lifeless; though not despairing, he does not accept. This helpless rolling to and fro, the painful letting-go, the irksome must-do-so, this state that now frees and now smothers, this half-sleep, this unrefreshing repose, all this rivets him fast to where he is, and makes him ready for hell." - Johann von Goethe

"The ends crown our works, but Thou crown'st our ends" - John Donne

"[Her eyes] let out more light, then they tooke in." - John Donne

"When a Base Man means to be your Enemy he always begins with being your Friend." - William Blake

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." - John Quincy Adams

"Skepticism is slow suicide." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us." - Thomas Browne

"Would you know what money is? Go borrow some." - George Herbert

"Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, science, philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim." - Giuseppe Mazzini

"Too low they build who build beneath the stars." - Edward Young

"[L]et us carry Skepticism ever so far, let us doubt, if we can, of every thing about us; we cannot doubt of what passes within ourselves. Our Passions and Affections are known to us. They are certain, whatever the Objects may be, on which they are employ’d." - Earl of Shaftesbury

"They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong; though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong; yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own." - James Russell Lowell

"When you establish that the sovereignty of the people is unlimited, you create and leave to chance in human society a degree of power too large for itself and which is an evil no matter into which hands it is placed.... [I]t is the degree of force and not the depositaries of this force which must be charged. It is the weapon and not the arm you must deal with severely. There are maces too heavy for the hands of man." - Benjamin Constant

"In the principle of equality I very clearly discern two tendencies; one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other prohibiting him from thinking at all." - Alexis de Tocqueville

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

"The Constitution is a compact to which the States were parties in their sovereign capacity: now, whenever a compact is entered into by parties which acknowledge no common arbiter to decide in the last resort, each of them has a right to judge for itself in relation to the nature, extent, and obligations of the instrument." - John Calhoun

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln

"Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible." - William James

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." - Theodore Roosevelt

"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." - Winston Churchill

"All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil." - John Stuart Mill

"Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil." - Albert Schweitzer

"The earth no longer has in reserve, as it had once, gifted peoples as yet unused, who can relieve us and take our place in some distant future as leaders of the spiritual life. There is not one among them which is not already taking such a part in our civilization that its spiritual fate is determined by our own. All of them, the gifted and the ungifted, the distant and the near, have felt the influence of those forces of barbarism which are at work among us. All of them are, like ourselves, diseased, and only as we recover can they recover. It is not the civilization of a race, but that of mankind, present and future alike, that we must give up as lost, if belief in a rebirth of our civilization is a vain thing." - Albert Schweitzer

"If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important." - Albert Camus

"[A]bsolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things." - Leo Strauss

"There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder." - Ronald Reagan

"Remember the ‘Parable of the Talents’ in the New Testament? Christ exhorts us to be the best we can be by developing our skills and abilities, by succeeding in all our tasks and endeavors. What better description can there be of capitalism?" - Margaret Thatcher

"Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law." - Allan Bloom

"We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years." - Roger Kimball

"The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize the truth, either in himself or anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves like an animal in satisfying his vices."- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I absolutely cannot see how one can later make up for having failed to go to a good school at the proper time. For this is what distinguishes the hard school as a good school from all others: that much is demanded; and sternly demanded; that the good, even the exceptional, is demanded as the norm; that praise is rare, that indulgence is nonexistent; that blame is apportioned sharply, objectively, without regard for talent or antecedents. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes." - Oswald Spengler

"One does not reflect on a point of honor - that is already dishonor…. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy - all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous." - Oswald Spengler

"But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world's history had never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very being, of its having both existence and awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be conceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: ‘What is truth?’… lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion - What is actuality? For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history. My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have set him." - Oswald Spengler

"No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order". This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. Religion is metaphysic and nothing else - ‘Credo quia absurdum’ - and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic - that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them." - Oswald Spengler

"The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down." - Miguel de Unamuno

"He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist." - Miguel de Unamuno

"Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human elements? Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth." - Walter Pater

"One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out." - Alexander Herzen

"Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle." - Calvin Coolidge

"America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force. No ambition, no temptation, lures her to thought of foreign dominions. The legions which she sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the cross. The higher state to which she seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God." - Calvin Coolidge

"For, once man is declared ‘the measure of all things,’ there is no longer a true, or a good, or a just, but only opinions of equal validity whose clash can be settled only by political or military force; and each force in turn enthrones in its hour of triumph a true, a good, and a just which will endure just as long as itself." - Bertrand de Jouvenel

"But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power, for Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties." - Bertrand de Jouvenel

"Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it." - Lord Halifax

"But there is no place for genuine ugliness, for final, unresolved self-contradiction or incoherence, in a work of art as a whole." - Louis Arnaud Reid

"The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of that Cold War." - Robert Conquest

"In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind a prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.… The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death." - Joseph de Maistre

"One must look at what [impiety] hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth." - Isaiah Berlin on Joseph de Maistre

"When one is engaged in a desperate defense of one’s world and its values, nothing can be given away, any breach in the walls might be fatal, every point must be defended to the death." - Isaiah Berlin

"A man’s powers of creation can only be exercised fully on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs." - Isaiah Berlin on Johann Herder

"The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos." - Eric Voegelin

"Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity." - Alan Keyes

"Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost." - George Santayana

"In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated." - George Santayana

"Permissiveness is eventually swallowed up by some form of tyranny because the time comes when it has nothing left to feed upon. As, one after another, the constituted authorities erode away under the acids of egalitarianism, the time is reached when there is nothing any longer to be permissive about. Permissiveness is like secularism in this respect, tonic only as long as there is still a solid wall of the sacred against which to tilt." - Robert Nisbet

"These modern humanists are… characteristically arrogant, opinionated, rootless, cynical, willing to sell themselves for power and affluence, ever eager to assault the public order and disturb the moral peace, and only too happy to sacrifice profundity, wisdom, and learning upon the altar of brilliance. Their presence, their incessant posturing, feuding, and caterwauling, should convince Everyman that any relief, any rebirth and renewal of society, is not immediately in view." - Robert Nisbet

"The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is." - Alasdair MacIntyre

"What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time." - Alasdair MacIntyre

"Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Much of the same sort of [degraded and filthy] talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them." - Frank Herbert

"Mankind has only one science. It’s the science of discontent." - Frank Herbert

"The people had the attitude of a subject population, not the attitude of free men. They were defensive, concealing, evasive. Any manifestation of authority was subject to resentment - any authority." - Frank Herbert

"A large populace held in check by a small but powerful force is quite a common situation in our universe. And we know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers - One: when they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of the leaders. Two: When the populace recognizes its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning. Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe that escape is possible." - Frank Herbert

"Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens." - Chalmers Johnson

"Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits.... [O]ne should... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh." - David B. Hart