“Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

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.

life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.

The more you know, the more you see

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.