“Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.”

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.

The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.

What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.

Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.

Safety lies in silence. It is easier to rectify what you miss by silence, than to secure what you lose by speaking.

I want a girl who respects herself. It means her standards are high and if I fit them then id be honored. If she’s easy then what does that say about me?

Hate to sound sleazy, but tease me, I don’t want it if it’s that easy.

It is easy to go down into Hell but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air – there’s the rub.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.

I’ve been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.

I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.