History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.

Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.