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

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Time stays, we go.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

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.

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

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Ethics and power are separate.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

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.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

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.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

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

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

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

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

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.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.