No one hates war like a soldier hates war.
There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
Find a mission that you can give yourself over to and then spend your days moving that mission forward. Man is made so that when anything fires his soul the impossibilities vanish. The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.
. . . he [Muhammad] declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. . . The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.
I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.
Farmers are philosophical. They have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts.
The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc.