“It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”

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

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

If you want to make a movie, make it. Don’t wait for a grant, don’t wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.

Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.

I don’t give up because I don’t give up. I don’t believe in it.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

No hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that there was in me.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.