All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people.
Laplace would have found it child’s-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself.
The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
The world is coming to an end in 1950.
We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.
In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
The philosopher says – I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers: – No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman’s slavery was assumed to be for life.
Man loves most that which is his own.
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.