“An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.”

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

Wickedness also resides in the gaze that perceives itself as innocent and surrounded by wickedness.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.

The spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressive motion, in giving itself a new form.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.

You have to test your ideas in a public forum.

Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.

An idea is inevitably a coordination. It is a coming together of something that is separate or disorganized or incomplete. With an idea you begin to feel into the nature of that incompleteness.

It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth.

I don’t like the idea of something where you have to depend upon the integrity of the man and not the integrity of the institution.

Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.

My mom was an executive at AT&T, a global account lady. I have no idea what she did. I just know she was never home and speaks several languages.

One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.