Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Hell is other people.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

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

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you’ve got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I’m not sure any country, either the United States or I don’t hear of anyone else, who’s willing to take on that responsibility.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

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.

Desire is the very essence of man.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

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.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

The approach of liberty makes even an old man brave.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

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.

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility.