“To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government.”
“If man is but a biological organism and biology itself may be reduced to a set of physical and chemical laws, it should be possible to build up a biological science, a kind of biological mechanics, whose laws would rule the working and repair of the several pieces of the human machine. In such a case, there would be a 'medicine' or 'medical science'; and the doctor's task would consist in acquiring and maintaining an adequate knowledge of the laws of such a science and applying them so to speak in a uniform and automatic way, with hardly any meddling from his own personal criterion. If, on the contrary, man is above all an eminently living being, every specimen of which is ever new and original, a being strongly influenced by ultra-physical faculties -- spirit, intellect, emotions -- if, in one word, man is a whole that can only be ruled from its own centre, medicine, then, will be but an art or a craft to be applied in each case to a concrete individual. And then, rather than 'medicine', there will be medicine-men. Truth lies between these two poles, but gravitates definitely towards the second.”
“The criminal excesses of unlimited capitalistic liberty had soon been checked thanks to the unlimited liberty of the press.”
“Sermons seldom convert sinners; they sometimes goad them into more sin.”
“The ideal holiday for the truly active man is one doing nothing in beautiful surroundings . . . and the ideal exercise for this best form of leisure is the old, natural, spontaneous movement of the body -- the walk.”
“Von der Pressefreiheit hängt praktisch jede andere Freiheit ab.”
“The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting.”