Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

For me, being raised in a free America made all the difference.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

What goes up must come down.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Let the path be open to talent.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

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

Every man is his own hell.

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Every country must be absolutely free to adopt the type of economic, political and social system that it considers convenient.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

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

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

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.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

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

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

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.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.