I saw this world-spirit riding out through the city on reconnaissance.

World history is progress in the consciousness of freedom.

What history teaches is that peoples and governments have never learned anything from it.

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.

The true is the whole.

The wise man is free from passions, not because he does not feel, but because his judgments are correct.

-- Chrysippus of Soli

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

-- Bertrand Russell

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

-- Benedictus de Spinoza

The divine law commands rational consideration of existing things and reflection upon them.

-- Averroes

The pleasant life is produced not by endless drinking and revelry but by sober reasoning.

-- Epicurus

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters.

-- Francisco Goya