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.

Facts" replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

The form of Christianity that developed in Europe and later spread to America and the rest of the world was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination . . .

But he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth,

I thank God,” he used to say, “that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

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

The worst conceivable government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself.

Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another, and may erupt in blood or print, irrevocably.

Coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life—bene vixit qui bene latuit.

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.

And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time.

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.

If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.

The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.