Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Many admire, few know.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I don’t see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

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

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

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

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

Ethics and power are separate.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

If you would judge, understand.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

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

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

I don’t think I would be interested in the climate at all if I had been like everyone else.

There is poison in the fang of the serpent, in the mouth of the fly and in the sting of a scorpion; but the wicked man is saturated with it.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.