Spinoza is the clear and luminous side of Modern philosophy. He is the negation of bourgeois mediation and of all the logical, metaphysical, and juri… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen in him love of justice.

He [Spinoza] believes in authority. And, of course, he believed in freedom of thought and expression, whereas Hobbes does not. There is a book on Spinoza written by an American ex-Marxist, called Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, on these lines. But Spinoza is not a theorist in whom I am particularly interested, because he is too rationalistic for me. But the Ethics is a wonderful book, and full of deep insights and noble feeling. It is totally unhistorical: the idea of timeless truths about human beings seems suspect to me.

The rediscovery of Spinoza by the Germans contributed to the shaping of the cultural destinies of the German people for almost two hundred years. Just as at the time of the Reformation no other spiritual force was as potent in German life as the Bible, so during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no other intellectual force so dominated German life as Spinozism. Spinoza became the magnet to German steel. Except for Immanuel Kant and Herbart, Spinoza attracted every great intellectual figure in Germany during the last two centuries, from the greatest, Goethe, to the purest, Lessing.