To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.