A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

Babylon is everywhere. You have wrong and you have right. Wrong is what we call Babylon, wrong things. That is what Babylon is to me. I could have born in England, I could have born in America, it make no difference where me born, because there is Babylon everywhere.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

Wherever there is a settled society, religion is necessary; the laws cover manifest crimes, and religion covers secret crimes.

Pop music will never be low brow.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.