Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. All that is not a true change will disappear in the future society.

The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.

Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you do or as fast. There is a time when you didn't know what you know today.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.

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.

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.

America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the “common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.