‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

The light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.

The Monuments that mightie Monarches reare,
Colosso’s statues, and Pyramids high,
In tract of time, doe moulder downe and weare,
Ne leave they any little memorie,
    The Passenger may warned be to say,
    They had their being here, another day.

But wise wordes taught, in numbers sweet to runne,
Preserved by the living Muse for aie,
Shall still abide, when date of these is done,
Nor ever shall by Time be worne away:
    Time, Tyrants, Envie, World assay thy worst,
    Ere Homer die, thou shalt be fired first.

If a man be wealthy, no matter how he gets it, of what parentage, how qualified, how virtuously endowed or villainously inclined; let him be a bawd, a gripe, a usurer, a villain, a pagan, a barbarian, a wretch, Lucian’s tyrant, “on whom you may look with less security than on the sun”; so that he be rich (and liberal withal) he shall be honoured, admired, adored, reverenced, and highly magnified.

Syracuse started flat, with used-car dealers and junkyards. Then came stucco bars and appliance stores in converted clapboard houses. It was late Friday afternoon, with rush hour and week-end traffic starting to overlap. Parker pushed the Olds through the traffic, making the best time he could. South Salina Street. The stores got taller and older, the traffic heavier, till they were downtown, where all the streets were one way the wrong way.
   "I hate this city,“ Parker said.
   "It’s a city,” Handy replied. “They’re all like this.”
   "I hate them all, then.

If a man have neither wife nor other to rule his household, know you how it is with the house? I know, and will tell you. If he be rich, and have plenty of grain, the sparrows and the moles eat their fill thereof. It is not set in order, but all so scattered abroad that the whole house is the fouler for it. If he have oil, it is all neglected and spilt; when the jars break and the oil is spilled, he casts a little earth on the spot, and all is done! In his bed, know you how he sleeps? He lies in a pit, with the sheets as they chance to have tumbled upon the bed; and they are never changed until they are torn. Even so in his dining-hall; here on the ground are melon-rinds, bones, and salad leaves, everything left lying on the ground without pretense of sweeping. He wipes the trenchers off; the dog licks them; so they are washed. His pipkins are all foul with grease: go and see how they stand! Know you how such a man lives? —even as a brute beast.

He who does not turn up the earth with the plough ought to write the parchment with his fingers.

He made no pretentions to botany, and knew nothing of groups or classification; he did not care in the least to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took no part, either for the utricles or against the cotyledons, or for Jussieu against Linnaeus. He did not study plants, he loved flowers. He had much respect for the learned, but still more for the ignorant; and, while he fulfilled his duty in both these respects, he watered his beds every summer evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.

For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.