The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.