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.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

The difference between humans and other mammals is that we know how to accessorize.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

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

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Who, being loved, is poor?

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Change is inevitable. Change is constant.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.