At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Racism is real in this country.

It was an act of patriotism when we worked to pass a law allowing the prosecution of federal hate crimes in the name of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it – not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.

According to the law of nature it is only fair that no one should become richer through damages and injuries suffered by another.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I love being in a courtroom.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

I’m not one of these guys who sits around saying, ‚Gee, I mean, the person had a strange childhood and that’s why he’s doing this horrible thing. Poor Jeffrey Dahmer. He’s just had a bad childhood and that’s why he’s eating people.‘ Wait a second! This person should be removed from the planet.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.