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

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry ‚Native passes‘ issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

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

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

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

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

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.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

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

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

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

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.