"In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty."

"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos."

"Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul."

"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."

"Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions."

"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."

"There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure."

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

"The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife."

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

"Never mind your happiness do your duty."

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

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

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."

"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say."

"We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries."

"In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order."

"The individual succumbs but he does not die if he has left something to mankind."

"If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous."

"Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard."

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

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

"So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean."

"Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law."

"I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy."

"Inquiry is fatal to certainty."

"Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things."

"Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk."

"And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world."

"The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years."

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

"No language has ever had a word for a virgin man."

"No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past."

"Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn."

"Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children."

"A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths."

"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 state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history."

"Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman."

"The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers."

"History is an excellent teacher with few pupils."

"It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."

"Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom."

"All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya."

"We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway."

"Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art."

"Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory."

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

"There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away."

"Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain."