It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise.

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you’re allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.

He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face.

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than others their opinions more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance between chaos and community.

One of the most pathetic—and dangerous—signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

Public education has not produced an educated public.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

A student is not a container you have to fill, but a torch you have to light up.

There is no education like adversity.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other persons point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.

Appearance rules the world.

What is a man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

I do not fix problems. I fix my thinking. Then problems fix themselves.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

Men should strive to think much and know little.

I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.

The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.