Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

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

It never ceases to amaze me: We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

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

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

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.