Am sorgfältigsten, mein Freund, meiden Sie die Autorschaft darüber. Zu früh oder unmäßig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wüste und das Herz leer, wenn … - Johann Gottfried Herder

The people need a master only as long as they have no understanding of their own. The more it acquires understanding, the more the government is bound to change its methods and to disappear. The most noble end of government is to become dispensable, so that everyone must govern himself.

We see so much that we in fact see nothing, and we know so much that we no longer possess anything that is our own, that is to say, something we could not have learned, something that arises out of the virtues and errors of our own self.

Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? ... No one is in his age alone, he builds on the preceding one, this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future, wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature, God’s speaking exemplary model in all works! Manifestly so in the human species!