The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror – and America is honored to be their friend.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

I think everyone should be with who they love.

Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

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.

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

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

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.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

It was a favorite expression of Theophrastus that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

No obligation to do the impossible is binding.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

When I don’t feel free and can’t do what I want I just react. I go against it.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Knowledge is true opinion.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

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

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

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

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.