Maxwell > Maxwell's Quotes

“It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.”
― William James, The Collected Works of William James

“No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless,”
― William James, The Collected Works of William James

“The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up.”
― William James, The Collected Works of William James

“Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism

“In the United States the progress is still more striking. In spite of immigration, or rather precisely because of the influx of surplus European labour, the United States have multiplied their wealth tenfold.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread: The Founding Book of Anarchism