Life's field will yield as we make it A harvest of thorns or of flowers.

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.

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

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wide choice of many alternatives.

Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

There is a force that somehow pushes us to choose the more difficult path whereby we can transcend the mire and muck into which we are so often born. Despite all that resists the process, we do become better human beings.

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.

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them, they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will sink out of sight.

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.

You and only you are responsible for your life choices and decisions.

The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.

When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

You cannot possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.

I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly two be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

You will find rest from vain fancies if you perform every act in life as though it were your last.

Nobody is more inferior than those who insists on being equal.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively.

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.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Life's blows cannot break a person whose spirit is warmed at the fire of enthusiasm!

Do not feel certain of anything.

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.

Dying is nothing. What is terrible is not to live.

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

He that hunts others, must run himself.