“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

Many people don’t understand ring control. They think they do until they’re against someone who really understands how to set traps, how to create holes in the octagon that they fall into.

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.

I had a hard time treating my field as if it’s horse racing, putting actors in competition against each other.

There’s only one thing you can use against pure logic, and that’s common sense.

Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.

In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest, there is a leaf that falls.