People love conspiracy theories.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

I think Buddhism should open the door of psychology and healing to penetrate more easily into the Western world.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

I have said a hundred times, and I have no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free States to enter into the slave States, and to interfere with the question of slavery at all. I have said that always.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people; and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There’s a thing in psychology where they think if it’s popular, it can’t be serious.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

People like to talk about war.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

You can’t just have slogans, you can’t just have catchy phrases. You have to have an agenda. And I think what the Republican Party has to do, if it’s going to incorporate the tea party efforts in it, is to come up with an agenda that the American people can see, touch, and actually believe in, and something they believe in.

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

Let it be our delight to find our society in the circle of which Jesus is the center, and let us make those our friends who are the friends of Jesus.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

I’m an atheist.

Of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most tolerance, but until now Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

I just don’t believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Religion is a matter of the heart. No physical inconvenience can warrant abandonment of one’s own religion.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

The American people have not become heartless.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

The safety of the people shall be the highest law.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.