“Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.”

The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

I’d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.

Pursuit and possession are accompanied by states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.

You look back and see how hard you worked and how poor you were, and how desperately anxious you were to succeed, and all you can remember is how happy you were.

She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.

Affluence means influence.

The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.

Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.

In a saturated population life is always cheap.

Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.

My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

There is nothing inevitable about crime and there is nothing inevitable about anti-social behaviour.

The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.