“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.”

People don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue.

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul – would you understand why that’s much harder?

Self respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it.

A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. If bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you.

My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

I could die for you. But I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live for you.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.

If one’s actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others.

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

The basic need of the creator is independence.

If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Freedom is to ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.

He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you could live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.

I do believe there are monstrous and evil acts, but I do not believe those who commit such acts are monsters or evil.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

Yes, my child, in this world, following your heart, remaining true to your soul, is sometimes the bravest thing you’ll ever do.