“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.”

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.

Bitterness leads nowhere. It turns back on itself. It is the eternal cul-de-sac.

Ever step you take is forever.

On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars – Something good will come out of all things yet – And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word.

You’d be a fool to think that you leaving me in darkness meant I’d stay there forever.

The Latina in me is an ember that blazes forever.

Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.

They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego cage of I, me, and mine