“There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.”

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

I came to believe in a power much higher than I.

A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks.

You can ask the people around me. I don’t give up. I don’t give up. I don’t give – and it’s not out of frustration and desperation that I say I don’t give up. I don’t give up because I don’t give up. I don’t believe in it.

We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing.

Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

My belief is that “recluse” is a code word generated by journalists; meaning, “doesn’t like to talk to reporters.”