“By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.”

It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Not to be cheered by praise, not to be grieved by blame, but to know thoroughly one’s own virtues or powers are the characteristics of an excellent man.

This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Then he said in his most excellent Mick impression, “Your powers are useless against Ninja Lords, O great zombie hunter! Surrender or feel the sting of the shuriken!

Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is ‘on paper.’

Science is an excellent piece of furniture to have in the second story, providing that you have common sense on the ground floor.

Louis Pasteur, the great scientist, said “chance favours the prepared mind”, which is a posh way of saying ‘do your homework’, but it’s an excellent piece of advice.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

Success means doing as excellent a job as you can on that particular day. The people I admire most aren’t necessarily the most wonderful athletes.