The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‚solution‘ to society’s ‚problems.‘

A lot of people ask me, ‚How did you have the courage to walk up to record labels when you were 12 or 13 and jump right into the music industry?‘ It’s because I knew I could never feel the kind of rejection that I felt in middle school. Because in the music industry, if they’re gonna say no to you, at least they’re gonna be polite about it.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

A lot of people ask me when I do a stunt, ‚Jackie, are you scared?‘ Of course I’m scared. I’m not Superman.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I love the name of honor, more than I fear death.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

He who has faith has… an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well – even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism – and wars.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

‚In Utero‘ was the first time I’d made an album that reached into the dark side. I remember the conflict and the uncertainty. I remember all those things when I hear ‚Pennyroyal Tea.‘

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

The pressure of adversity does not affect the mind of the brave man… It is more powerful than external circumstances.