Society and the World

Liberal institutions straightway cease to be liberal, as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

I believe only in French culture and consider everything else in Europe today that calls itself “culture” a misunderstanding—not to speak of German culture.

What can largely be achieved by punishment, in man or beast, is the increase of fear, the intensification of intelligence, the mastering of desires: punishment tames man in this way but does not make him “better”—we would be more justified in asserting the opposite.

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

[ To a railway stationmaster :] We must leave exactly on time. . . . From now on everything must function to perfection.

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.

Rome-Berlin axis.

When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. . . . When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

The two valets sit at the top of the table, but at least I have the honor of being placed above the cooks.

They shoot the white girl first.

[ Of Bill Clinton :] This is our first black President.

Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. . . . Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. . . . Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.

Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l’humaîne condition .

Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.