Next to the assumption of power is the responsibility of relinquishing it.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.

The day will soon come when I will show the world that the transmission of power and speech without the aid of any wires is possible.

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of everything else to which he is justly entitled.

Conceit spoils the finest genius… and the great charm of all power is modesty.

Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.

I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.

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

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.

We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself—and be lenient to everybody else.

In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.