You can never have an impact on society if you have not yet changed yourself.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If all people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.

The atom, being for all practical purposes the stable unit of the physical plane, is a constantly changing vortex of reactions.

Have to and get to—both are choices. One is negative and one is positive. Choose the right one and it can change your life.

Maturity is the ability to live in peace with that which we cannot change.

Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

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

You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man’s actions are, such must be his spirit.

The true worth is not to be found in man himself, but in the colors and texture that come alive in others.

It is of particular value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.

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

I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.

I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the “oughtness” that forever confronts him.

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.

Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

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

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

This I learned in Auschwitz: There are only two races. The race of the decent and the race of the indecent.

If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

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.