Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic desire for freedom and dignity.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. ...this is the magic glass ... .

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

... a harsh reproof, or trivial event
that changed some childish day to tragedy ...

We are all products of the assistance we are able to accept.

Why do you smile? Change but the name,
and it is of yourself that the tale is told.

Rankism explains a lot of the bad behavior we see in both institutions and cultures, as well as between individuals. … Giving it a name empowers those on the receiving end to fight it, or at least to resist the corrosive effect it may have on their own souls.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

When first we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model.

Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

This is the age of The Résumé Gods.…in which it is immoral to discriminate according to race or sex, but discrimination according to career status is so thoroughly baked into society that it governs everything from restaurant table assignments to elementary school admissions prospects.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong,
then Buddhism will have to change

This century will be defined by a debate that will run through the remainder of its decades: religion versus science. Religion will lose.

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to Man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden
his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Civilization is tissue thin

Civilization is nothing more than the effort
to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

War’s a game, which,
Were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.

“I’m still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the devil clear.”
“And what’s he?”
“Not seeing whole.”

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Fighting Nazis and finding love—
that’s what my life is about.

I’ve got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied …
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.

It is excellent to have a giant’s strength;
but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.

In the world to come I shall not be asked: “Why were you not Moses?” I shall be asked: “Why were you not Zusya?”

Look back upon your life and ask: What up to now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by their sequence they will yield to you a basic law of your true self. Compare these objects and see how they form a ladder on which you have so far climbed up toward yourselves.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ….

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”

To be human is not to know one’s self. The “I” that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction—a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us. In this sense, personal history and public history share the same dynamic principle: both are fables agreed upon.

But man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur’d,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, can still suspect, and still revere himself
In lowliness of heart.

True dignity is never gained by place, and never lost when honors are withdrawn.

Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so,
Not for thy faults, but mine.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Such are the facts in human experience…rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman; it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself… [I]n the long, weary march, each one walks alone…

This is a solitude which…every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea—the solitude of self

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Each person has a piece of the truth, but no one has the whole of it. The first step to a broader truth is to take a stand strongly for our own piece of it, and then to engage in principled struggle with those who disagree. If we listen, more truth emerges from the struggle.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

The investigator should have a robust faith—and yet not believe.

Modern art writ large presents one cultural expression of a larger political gamble on the human possibility of living in change and without absolutes.

Know you what it is to be a child? … it is to believe in belief….

The public…demands certainties… But there are no certainties.

Culture is the glue which holds peoples together.

Tu eres me otro yo.
(You are my other self.)

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal,
That’s born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!

The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

It is wrong to say God made both rich and poor. He made only male and female; and He gave them the earth for their inheritance.

Payments [from the national fund are to] be made to every person, rich or poor. It is best to make it so, to prevent invidious distinctions. … [Those who] do not choose to receive it can throw it into the common fund.

Sure, meritocracies are fine,
but why take the chance?

Poverty is the new slavery.

Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous

Live your life as if there are no miracles and everything is a miracle.

With no attempt there can be no failure;
with no failure, no humiliation.

Why must institutions make a judgment that has lifetime consequences after a mere six or seven years? … Why not a system of contracts of varying length, including lifetime for the most valuable colleagues, that acknowledges the realities of academic life in the twenty-first century?…Today, almost every negative tenure decision is appealed. … Few if any of these appeals have as their basis a denial of academic freedom.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

This is the age of The Résumé Gods.…in which it is immoral to discriminate according to race or sex, but discrimination according to career status is so thoroughly baked into society that it governs everything from restaurant table assignments to elementary school admissions prospects.

The history of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.

I, Galileo Galilei, aged 70, arraigned before this tribunal of Inquisitors against heretical depravity, swear that I have always believed all that is taught by the Church. But whereas I wrote a book in which I adduce arguments of great cogency … that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves, I abjure, curse, and detest these errors and heresies and I swear that I will never again assert anything that might furnish occasion for suspicion regarding me

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a … construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

I’m afraid of dying before I prove that I’m somebody.

Peter Gloystein, Economy Minister in the state of Bremen, Germany, poured wine over the head of homeless Udo Oelschlaeger during the launch of German wine week. “Here’s something for you to drink,” he said as he doused Mr. Oelschlaeger, who was standing next to the podium at the public, open-air event.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?” a tearful Mr. Oelschlaeger retorted.

Mr. Gloystein, who was subsequently forced to resign his ministerial post, said he’d later met Mr. Oelschlaeger, who explained his difficult life. Mr. Gloystein apologized and they departed on friendly terms.

Dignity is not negotiable.