Julian

It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory.

Constantinople has no past; only a noisy present and a splendid future, if the auguries are to be believed.

...for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own.

Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition.

Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.

On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.

Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?

We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers.

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.

There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place.

Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!

Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind.

Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince?

The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity.

They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.

By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him.

In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.

His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.

One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.

...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another.

We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another.

Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.