“Nothing comes easily. My work smells of sweat.”

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one’s own life.

Language was invented to ask questions.

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.

All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.

Choices are easy when you have nothing to lose.

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

Those who seek the easy way do not seek the true way.

Fighting is easy to understand. You just hit the guy as hard as you can.

To be dull is easy, to be active requires tremendous work.

For all of us it’s very easy to be out here and do what we do, easy in the sense that it’s a gift but it can be difficult at times.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.

Motherhood: if it were going to be easy, it never would have started with something called labor.