Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

God doesn’t do things halfway. He goes all out! When God does something, it’s not just barely enough, mediocre or lukewarm.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

I have the space and liberty to create.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I believe in God – not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

We are a nation founded as a rebuke to tyranny. A nation of revolutionaries who refused sovereign reign from afar. Hear me – we’re a nation that says give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A nation built on our differences, guided by the belief that we’re all created equal.

For me to talk with Obama and the conversation I had with him, I was letting him know that me and my fans have a special connection, and it’s love, and I believe that love is the answer.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

I can do whatever I want.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.