“I am always suspicious of righteous indignation. Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation.”

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.

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

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.

Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.

There is no compassion for those who lack compassion.

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

I’m kind because I know how cruel feels.

Heaven help the man who kicks the man who has to crawl.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little.

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.