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

Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, butt in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.

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.

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.

The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.

Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

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

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

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

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.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside all rules and demands of society.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

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.

You don't have to be big or well known to be great.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

The world is a comedy to those that think, and a tragedy to those that feel.

The past is memory. The future is imagination. All that exists is now.

The oldest, shortest words - “yes” and “no” - are those which require the most thought.

Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind.

I do not fix problems. I fix my thinking. Then problems fix themselves.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

An hour of planning can say you 10 hours of doing.

You must try to observe yourself more and more objectively, to look at everything in yourself as though another person.

If you want material prosperity, you must first think prosperity thoughts, and then make a habit of doing so, for the thing that keeps most people poor is the sheer habit of poverty thinking.