But all my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise.

We don't point a pistol at our own forehead. That is not the way to conduct negotiations.

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

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.

Wherever there is injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.

Religion is a great force—the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get a man through his own religion and not through yours.

A man has to learn that he cannot command things, but that he can command himself; that he cannot coerce the wills of others, but that he can mold and master his own will: and things serve him who serves Truth; people seek guidance of him who is master of himself.

I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.

But truth is hard as adamant and tender as a blossom.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

The liar is no better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.