Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. . . let us be above such transparent egotism.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.

Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.

In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

You can’t fool all the people all the time,” but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say "Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history

By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.

Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.

History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice.

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong?

The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;

But now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.

...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

Nothing is impossible to gods and authors.

When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.

It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole.