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

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Nonviolence is a good policy when the conditions permit.

Racism is real in this country.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

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

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

There is no such thing as part freedom.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.