Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.

God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.

When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.

The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.