“You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.”

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Vice is its own reward.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.

If you acquit me, you will give me great pleasure. If you condemn me you will do me honour!

We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

In order to develop love – universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad. One must open oneself to life, communicate with it.

I’ve always wanted to stay true to myself, and I’ve managed to do that. People have to accept that.

I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.

You must personally accept the responsibility of improving your own life.