Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.

The evident character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn

An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole.

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable