If you take a personal problem seriously enough, you will simultaneously solve a social problem.

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.

All that is important in this moment is movement. Make the movement vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

We must each lead a way of life with self-awareness and compassion, to do as much as we can. Then, whatever happens we will have no regrets.

For all men strive to grasp what they do not know, while none strive to grasp what they already know; and all strive to discredit what they do not excel in, while none strive to discredit what they do excel in. This is why there is chaos.

He who has so little knowledge of human natures as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

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

The world is a mountain, in which your words are echoed back to you.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

View your life from your funeral: Looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn't? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what wouldn't you do?

The less you respond to negative people, the positive your life will become.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

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

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one is useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

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."

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

The overwhelming importance of the atmosphere means that there are no longer any frontiers to defend against pollution, attack, or propaganda. It means, further, that only by a deep patriotic devotion to one’s country can there be a hope of the kind of protection of the whole planet, which is necessary for the survival of the people of other countries.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

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.

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

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.