“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.”

No social stability without individual stability.

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. That is his right. It is his legal right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right, and no one can or dare question his exercise of that legal right.

There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you’re trying to make.

Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.

My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.

You know, and we did – 20-year hiatus we had – and we went back and made 105 new ones. And so I really feel very strongly that there are certain things I won’t do.

There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We’re using those things – but we’re not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.

We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.