Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

A witty saying proves nothing.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

History should be written as philosophy.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual’s own reason and critical analysis.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

The racing is quite boring, sometimes. It’s hard to see how it pulls in fans.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Hoover was a patriot in his heart, but he definitely exceeded his power.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.

Industry need not wish.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.