One may have good eyes and yet see nothing.

The clearest way in the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.

Why look for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much.

Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

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.

The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

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.

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.

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

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

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

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.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

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.

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.

I have met men who are habitual liars. They have lied so long that they no longer can distinguish between the truth and a lie. Their sensitivity to sin has been almost completely deadened.

Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

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.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

There is nothing in the world that empowers a human being to overcome external difficulties or internal hardships so much as the awareness that one has a task in life.