To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

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

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.

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

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

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

I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

There has to be a global mission of human progress.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

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

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

You’re innocent until proven guilty.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

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