We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

Honor bespeaks worth. Confidence begets trust. Service brings satisfaction. Cooperation proves the quality of leadership.

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

You should respect each other and refrain from disputes; you should not, like water and oil, repel each other, but should, like milk and water, mingle together.

Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.

If you want the cooperation of humans around you, you must make them feel they are important, and you do that by being genuine and humble.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

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

Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.

I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

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