“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.

But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

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.

A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

There are worse things than a lie… I have found… that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

I once tried standing up on my toes to see far out in the distance, but I found that I could see much farther by climbing to a high place.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.

And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start?

But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis…

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon ‘s immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.