There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. To this chiefly it is owing that we find sects and parties in most branches of science [and politics] and disputes that are carried on from age to age, without being brought to issue.

It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances.

Every theory in philosophy, which is built on pure conjecture, is an elephant and every theory that is supported partly by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.

I wanted to be a part of the downtown renaissance.

I sit in my loft with the haves and look out at the have-nots - the bottom of the bottom - and I have to rationalize it, ... Am I pushing out the homeless?

For, until the wisdom of men bear some proportion to the wisdom of God, their attempts to find out the structure of his works, by the force of their wit and genius, will be vain.

A definition is nothing else but an explication of the meaning of a word, by words whose meaning is already known. Hence it is evident that every word cannot be defined for the definition must consist of words and there could be no definition, if there were not words previously understood without definition.

The finest productions of human art are immensely short of the meanest work of Nature. The nicest artist cannot make a feather or the leaf of a tree.

In every case, we ought to act that part towards another, which we would judge to be right in him to act toward us, if we were in his circumstances and he in ours or more generally - What we approve in others, that we ought to practise in like circumstances, what we condemn in others we ought not to do.

must acknowledge, that to act properly is much more valuable than to think justly or reason acutely.

Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of an adult.