One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.

Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life. By them we live, and by the same token we rarely think of them.... One may symbolize the individual life as a bank of issue. The bank lives on the credit of a gold reserve which is rarely seen, which lies at the bottom of metal coffers hidden in the vaults of the building. The most elementary caution will suggest that from time to time the effective condition of these guaranties--of these credences, one might say, that are the basis of credit--be passed in review.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at ist own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority.

All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.