To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
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The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.
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There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
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There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.
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In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
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A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
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People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
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One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
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To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
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Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
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A man by himself is in bad company.
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The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.
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It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.
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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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Animals often strike us as passionate machines.
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A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
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The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
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Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
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Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
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We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.
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Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
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The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
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A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
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People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self.
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The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
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The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
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