“Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.”

The old liberal rebelled against taxation without responsibility, the new liberal wants the taxation as a handout without responsibility.

Many souls fail to find God because they want a religion which will remake society without remaking themselves.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

Love was meant to be also a sign, a symbol, a messenger, a telltale of the Divine. Love is a messenger from God saying that every human affection and every ecstasy of love are sparks from the great flame of love that is God.

Freedom that ignores the transcendent difference between good and evil ends in the denial of freedom itself.

Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments.

I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

There is no word more “dangerous” than liberalism, because to oppose it is the new “unforgivable sin.”

Liberty is no heirloom. It requires the daily bread of self-denial, the salt of law and, above all, the backbone of acknowledging responsibility for our deeds.

To tell a woman who is forty, “You look like sixteen,” is boloney. The blarney way of saying it is “Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are the most beautiful.

Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one’s own.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.

Skeptics always want miracles such as stepping down from the Cross, but never the greater miracle of forgiveness.

Before the sin, Satan assures us that it is of no consequence; after the sin, he persuades us that it is unforgivable.

Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.

I don’t care what critics and other people think.

When I’m writing, I’m locking myself in a room. I’m the worst critic in the world. I write something and then I beat myself up. I’m like “Vin, you’re retarded, that makes no sense.”

I am a great admirer of other actors, but I never compete with other actors. I always compete with what I did last, and I’m my own most vicious critic. So I’m always trying to do it better.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

If you want criticisms, read the dissenting opinions of the Court. That will give you criticisms.

You can’t be sensitive, because you’re going to get criticized. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to get criticized.

Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking.