Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was the very day that young Hamlet was born, he that is mad and sent into England." "Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?" "Why, because he was mad. He shall recover his wits there, or, if he do not, it's no great matter there." "Why?" "'Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he.
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.
A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without.
A dowried wife, friends, beauty, birth, fair fame, These are the gifts of money, heavenly dame: Be but a moneyed man, persuasion tips Your tongue, and Venus settles on your lips.
It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.
It is not our frowning battlements...or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land... Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.
Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.