“I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.”

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

Those who attempt to level never equalize.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

You can never plan the future by the past.

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.

Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it’s yellow.

This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake.

This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions….

Negative relationships are unpleasant but predictable.

Indeed, not all attacks-especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin-are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.