Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement.
In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.
Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.
The purpose of philosophers is to show people what is right under their noses.
The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.
What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.
Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.
Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.
It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.
Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.
Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.
EVERY intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are.
Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.
Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.
Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind.
Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.
We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.
...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.
Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.
Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.
It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.