“Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”

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.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

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

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

You cannot reclaim what you have spent.

Everybody in politics claims to want to get everybody out of poverty. What’s the opposite? Wealth. And what is often criticized by the left? Wealth.

Free speech gives us the ability to react vigorously with effective arguments and expose the weakness and misdirection of the other side’s claims.

Impatience and stupidity claim more victims than any weapon.

We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.

For all the claims that we now live in a society free of racism, the tragedies that presently overwhelm us are a stiff dose of reality.

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.