“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.

It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.

I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. Confused people can make no clear demands.

There’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.

And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

I’m a hard guy to live with. I’m like a caged animal. I’m up all night walking around the living room. It’s hard for me to come down from what I do.

Animals don’t hate, and we’re supposed to be better than them.

Just because an animal is large, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want kindness.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.