A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit upon i — Force

"There are many changes in what concepts are important when we go from classical to quantum mechanics. ... In particular, the force concept gradually fades away, while the concepts of energy and momentum become of paramount importance. You remember that instead of particle motions, one deals with probability amplitudes which vary in space and time. In these amplitudes there are wavelengths related to momenta, and frequencies related to energies. The momenta and energies, which determine the phases of wave functions, are therefore the important quantities in quantum mechanics. Instead of forces, we deal with the way interactions change the wavelength of the waves. The idea of a force becomes quite secondary—if it is there at all. When people talk about nuclear forces, for example, what they usually analyze and work with are the energies of interaction of two nucleons, and not the force between them. Nobody ever differentiates the energy to find out what the force looks like."

"The laws of motion of visible and tangible, or molar, matter had been worked out to a great degree of refinement and embodied in the branches of science known as Mechanics, Hydrostatics, and Pneumatics. These laws had been shown to hold good... throughout the universe on the assumption that all such masses of matter possessed inertia and were susceptible of acquiring motion, in two ways, firstly by impact, or impulse from without; and, secondly, by the operation of certain hypothetical causes of motion termed forces, which were usually supposed to be resident in the particles of the masses themselves, and to operate at a distance, in such a way as to tend to draw any two such masses together, or to separate them more widely."

"The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men."

"The danger is becoming greater. As the arsenals of the superpowers grow in size and sophistication and as other governments—perhaps even, in the future, dozens of governments—acquire these weapons, it may be only a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed or miscalculation lets loose the terrible force."

"The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered."

"Power is not a star war but a war of hawks If you want to overcome any predatory animal you must hold on to your strength relax your fertility and act completely normally If you feel fear on your face you will become prey."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"

"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."

"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."