That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.

Accept things to which fate binds you, love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Now is the accepted time.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

For we that live please must please to live.

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

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

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

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

The generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.