You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.

An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over ashes.

When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?

It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.

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

Either you will control your government, or government will control you.

He who fears the sun will not become chief.

The lion doesn't turn around when the small dog barks.

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.

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

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

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.

The liar is no better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.