[Darwin] introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

[Demosthenes' style] was wonderfully pleasing to the common people, but by well-educated persons, it was looked upon as mean, humiliating, and unmanly.

[Discussions about] gender bring us right up face-to-face with sex, as well as love… the functioning of society and the conditions of freedom.

[Dostoevsky’s wife] had noticed that the one thing which offered any real hope of salvation—his literary production—never went better than when they had lost everything.... When his sense of guilt was satisfied by the punishments he had inflicted on himself, the inhibition on his work became less severe.

[Edhi was] a living example of social justice, compassion and solidarity in action.

[Everyone has] an inner potentiality which can absorb the truth but cannot be activated as long as the mind is not disentangled from its attachments to the phenomenal.

[Fitzgerald] was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation ... He might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.

[Giants are dwarfs.] Giants are usually really dwarfs as abundance lowers importance. Don’t value books by their thickness, quantity over quality, magnitude over intensity.

[Homer was] the greatest of poets and the first of tragedy writers [but unfortunately he became] the educator of Hellas [and the gude] for the ordering of human things.

[I am a] man who has never had the wit to be idle during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many care about—wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties.

[If we] give up on free will; no one really deserves blame or credit for anything; we are all slaves of biology.

[in America] They plow fields 100 times larger but live a more meager and deprived existence than the Japanese farmer on two or 3 acres... the ultimate cause for this is the meat-based diet of Americans... this has totally unbalanced American land

[Islam's] greatest theologian, the Augustine and the Kant of Islam, Al-Ghazali... returned through mysticism to all orthodox views... even Christian theologians were glad to find such a defense of religion. After him, philosophy hid itself in the remote corners of the Moslem world; the pursuit of science waned; and the mind of Islam more and more buried itself... the victorious mysticism of al-Ghazali put a cloture on speculative thought

[Jesus] has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way... the specific doctrine of Jesus has not in all this time been put into political or general social practice.

[John] meets Yoko Ono at this art show and he thinks that she is just the grooviest, funniest, spaciest thing he’s ever met. He can’t imagine anyone more spaced out than Yoko Ono. And then he falls for her... [breaking up the Beatles] is kind of a nasty ball and chain that’s going to stick with her. I’m sure they loved each other. I’m convinced that those two were totally hellbent and passionate about their relationship to each other, even when it was troublesome.

[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.

[Language] must simply be a biological property of the human mind.

[Leaders—emperors or hegemons] entrusted the worthy and employed the capable, rewarded the good and punished the evil, prohibited cruelty and executed the rebellious. Therefore, they differ in the honor or pettiness of their status, in the depth or shallowness of their virtue, in the greatness or insignificance of their achievements, in the breadth or narrowness of their governmental orders, but they do not contradict each other like white and black or sweet and bitter.

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out

[Meditation cultivates] the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations… and by getting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.