If it is an imperfect word no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

Class struggle: external peace international solidarity peace among peoples. This is the sacred slogan of international socialist democracy that liberates nations.

To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood.

Without free self-respecting and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace that is peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state there can be no guarantee of external peace.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

External nature is only internal nature writ large.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state and all men of our time are in such a state.

In other words knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

And as I have said it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.