Quotes

Freiheit ist immer nur Freiheit des anders Denkenden .

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.

[ Words upon resuming a lecture after being imprisoned for five years, Salamanca University, 1577 :] We were saying yesterday . . .

Ut quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum .

Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur ,

Nil posse creari de nilo .

Whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the other [Democratic side], it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties.

All history shows that the hand that cradles the rock has ruled the world, not the hand that rocks the cradle!

You know, that’s the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother.

But much of what Mr. [Vice-President Henry] Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still “globaloney.” Mr. Wallace’s warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.

It is not granted to know which man took up arms with more right on his side. Each pleads his cause before a great judge: the winning cause pleased the gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato.

Nature abhors . . . a virgin—a frozen asset.

Democ’acy gives every man

Though old the thought and oft expressed,

And what is so rare as a day in June?

We have . . . defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil: the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

The Analytical Engine [Charles Babbage’s visionary computer] has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine [Charles Babbage’s visionary computer] weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

[ On Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary:] That sort of thing wears thin—for when one’s cynicism becomes perfect and absolute, there is no longer anything amusing in the stupidity and hypocrisy of the herd. It is all to be expected—what else could human nature produce?—so irony annuls itself by means of its own victories!

Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,

I hear in the chamber above me

As unto the bow the cord is,

And the night shall be filled with music,

From the waterfall he named her,

Into each life some rain must fall,

The bards sublime,

Each morning sees some task begin,

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

There is a Reaper whose name is Death,

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

In the beginning all the World was America .

The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.

Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience .

[ Diary entry, 5 Aug. 1939 :] Life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

The Wave of the Future.

I . . . understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. . . . Women’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

“The sun,” said Mr. Bull, “never sets on English dominion. Do you understand how that is?” “Oh, yes,” said the Indian, “that is because God is afraid to trust them in the dark.”

A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade.

[ After being requested to remove Ulysses S. Grant from command because he drank too much :] Can you tell me where he gets his whiskey? . . . Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.

Mr. Lincoln [told] the story of the young man who had an aged father and mother owning considerable property. The young man being an only son and believing that the old people had lived out their usefullness assassinated them both. He was accused, tried, and convicted of the murder. When the judge came to pass sentence upon him and called upon him to give any reason he might have why the sentence of death should not be passed upon him, he with great promptness replied he hoped the court would be lenient upon him because he was a poor orphan.

[ Remark at conference of cabinet members and generals, 10 Jan. 1862 :] If General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it.

He [Lincoln] used to liken the case to that of the boy who, when asked how many legs his calf would have if he called its tail a leg, replied, “Five,” to which the prompt response was made that calling the tail a leg would not make it a leg.