“I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.”

Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty. Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty. It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict.

None meet life honestly and few heroically.

I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

You can only be free if I am free.

For to know all is to understand all, and this leaves no room for judgment and condemnation.

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.

We’re all killers at heart, I have never taken anybody’s life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.

Everybody is a potential murderer. I’ve never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.

No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear.

It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

You can’t get to a pleasant place to be at unless you use pleasant methods to get there. When you are dealing with a human society the means is fully as important as the end.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.

In love with September’s sun the season that begins all witchy things and stirs the soul.

In the beginning, I wrote OK songs, but they didn’t have a unique perspective.

The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself – and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.

My book came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.