“I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.”

I am simply an agnostic. I haven’t yet had time or opportunity to explore the universe, and I don’t know what I might run on to in some nook or corner.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom.

The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.

The truth is always modern and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice.

Ancestors do not mean so much. The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft. Rebels are made from life, not ancestors.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much.

Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they are meant to serve.

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.

The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.

Great wealth often curses all who touch it.

One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.

The purpose of man is like the purpose of a pollywog – to wiggle along as far as he can without dying; or, to hang to life until death takes him.

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.

I don’t think that work ever really destroyed anybody. I think that lack of work destroys them a hell of a lot more.

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.

Maybe I’ve dragged myself through the mud since then, but even mud hardens beneath your shoes. I must be standing on a mountain of it by now. And no one can touch me from way the hell up here.

Some men can get results if kindly encouraged, but give me the kind that do things in spite of hell.

Would that God would make hell so real to us that we cannot rest; Heaven so real that we must have men there.

The man who gets me is getting one hell of a woman.

That’s precisely the question everyone should be asking-why the hell not? – Why not you, why not now.

Shall we all be saved? Shall we go to Heaven? Alas, my children, we do not know at all! But I tremble when I see so many souls lost these days. See, they fall into Hell as leaves fall from the trees at the approach of winter.