If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

We all have done something unethical.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

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.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.

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.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

The ‚morality of compromise‘ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

I’m opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s will.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

Personally, I don’t wear fur.

Truth is what works.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

To compromise simply means that you go a tiny bit below what you know is right.