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

"We can think of the evolutionary process that transformed the nonhuman ancestors of mankind into human beings as a succession of small, gradual changes spread over millions of years. But we cannot think of a mind in which the category of action would have been present only in an incomplete form. There is nothing in between a being driven exclusively by instincts and physiological impulses and a being that chooses ends and the means for the attainment of these ends. We cannot think of an acting being that would not in concreto distinguish what is end and what is means, what is success and what is failure, what he likes more and what he likes less, what is his profit or his loss derived from the action and what his costs are."

"The description of the origin of an idea should not be taken for a definition, nor should an account of the mental and physical conditions for becoming aware of a proposition be taken for a proof. … Otherwise we would find it necessary to take account of the phosphorous content of our brain in proving Pythagoras’ theorem, and astronomers would shy away from extending their conclusions to the distant past, for fear of the objection: “You reckon that 2 x 2 = 4 held then; but the idea of number had a development, a history! One can doubt whether it had reached that stage by then. How do you know that this proposition already existed at that point in the past? Might not the creatures living at that time have held the proposition 2 x 2 = 5, from which the proposition 2 x 2 = 4 only evolved through natural selection in the struggle for existence; and might not this in turn, perhaps, be destined to develop further into 2 x 2 = 3?” … What is called the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words."

"Are there universal truths or ethical positions that transcend time? Or is everything historically determined?"