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

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

Politics have no relation to morals.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

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.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

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

For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.

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

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

Nature does nothing in vain.

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

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.

I don’t believe in death, neither in flesh nor in spirit.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

The great question of our time is, ‚Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?‘

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, sacrifice and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Real living is living for others.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.