Don't break your shin on a stool that is not in your way.

It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.

We are free up to the point of choice, then the choice controls the chooser.

Extremists on all sides thrive, fed by the blood lust of centuries gone by.

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

The free flow of conflicting ideas and feelings is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.

It is very important to know who you are. To make decisions. To show who you are.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaring evident which everybody had decided not to see.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.

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

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

The better you are at communicating negotiating, and handling your fear of rejection, the easier life is.

No problem is so deep that it cannot be overcome, given the will of all parties, through discussion and negotiation rather than force and violence.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

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.

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

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace, and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

Madness does not govern a country; discussion does.

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.

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

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

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.