No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Where words fail, music speaks.

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

No problem is so deep that it cannot be overcome, given the will of all parties, through discussion and negotiation rather than force and violence.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

Understanding a question is half an answer.

The generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.

If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

We have more machinery of government that is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.

The higher you soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

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.

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Everything you say should be true but not everything true should be said.

Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

We know how to speak many falsehoods which resemble real things, but we know, when we will, how to speak true things.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably gracious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, one hundred.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

But truth is hard as adamant and tender as a blossom.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

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.

Realizing the Divine as Truth will save you hours of work in research in any field. You will be led to the right book or the right place or the right person without loss of time, or the necessary information will come to you in some other way.

Everything you said should be true but not everything true should be said.

If you compromise your own conscience, you will weaken your conscience. Soon your conscience will fail to guide you and you never will have real wealth based on peace of mind.