The Thinkers

“Lead the people by laws and they will avoid punishment but lose shame; lead them by virtue and they will reform themselves.”

“Asabiyyah, the cohesion of a group, is what builds dynasties; its exhaustion is what ends them.”

“Act only on the maxim you could will to be a universal law for everyone.”

“Reason is the universal endowment, or it is nothing.”

“The road from slavery to freedom runs through the alphabet.”

“Labour produces value the worker doesn't fully receive.”

“The polyphonic discipline: give voice to the position you do not hold, in its strongest form.”

“Religion, property, and government are the dominion of the mind, the body, and human conduct.”

“Knowledge is dispersed; no planner can hold it.”

“The corruption of language is the corruption of thought.”

“War is the gravest of state affairs and must not be undertaken lightly.”

“Before I judge a thing I divide it into its kinds, for until the kinds are separated we are talking about a heap and calling it a subject.”

“Look to the effectual truth, the world as it is and not as imagined; he who quits what is done for what ought to be done secures his ruin.”

“Without a common power to overawe them all, men are in a war of every man against every man.”

“I do not begin with a system; I settle first what a word shall be understood to mean, and let the matter follow plainly from there.”

“When I look for the necessary connexion between cause and effect, I find it nowhere in the objects, only in my own mind, in the habit of expecting the one upon the other.”

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains; the only liberty worth the name is obedience to a law one has made oneself.”

“Markets coordinate strangers better than committees.”

“Natural rights are inherent in human beings, not granted by any government.”

“I demonstrated that the world is suffering; I did not merely feel it was sad, and the difference is the whole of my dignity.”

“The equality of conditions is providential and irreversible; it is not the same thing as liberty, and may be its quiet enemy.”

“The only liberty that warrants the name is pursuing your own good in your own way.”

“Subjectivity is truth: not whatever you feel, but the relation in which you stand to what you receive.”

“God is dead, and we have killed him; the deed is greater than we are, and its full consequence is not yet felt.”

“Read the scripture precisely, then count what it costs the women who live under it.”

“The colored woman confronts both a woman question and a race problem, and is an unacknowledged factor in both.”

“Each soul is potentially divine; the goal is to manifest that divinity.”

“Capitalist society faces its dilemma: an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism.”