“The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.”

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.

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

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.

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

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.

I don’t see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes.

You have to go broke three times to learn how to make a living.

We create a standard for how we want to do things, and everybody’s got to buy into that standard or you really can’t have any team chemistry.

Everyone goes through adversity in life, but what matters is how you learn from it.

Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You’re Alive Is By How Much Pain You’re Experiencing, Or How Little.

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.