If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

The charges we bring against others often come home to ourselves; we inveigh against our faults which are as much ours as theirs; and so our eloquence ends by tellings against ourselves.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.

When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.

The clearest way in the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

The whole universe is contained within a single human being—you.

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

Being aware of a single shortcoming within yourself is far more useful than being aware of a thousand in someone else!

The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

If there is anything in the world a person should fight for, it is freedom to pursue his ideal, because in that is his great opportunity for self-expression, for the unfoldment of the greatest thing possible to him.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

Freedom of information is a fundamental human right...for a nation that is afraid to let its people to judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

You find out the necessity of Liberty as you find out the necessity of air—by not having enough of it.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance.

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."

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

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.

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

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.

The more I study science the more I believe in God.

A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes…loses its moral rights to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.

The purpose of Propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human.

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.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

We have more machinery of government that is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

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.

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

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.”

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

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

For truth is precious and divine—too rich a perl for carnal swine.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.