As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority.
There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.
Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.
Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.
Man’s character is the product of his premises.
If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money; either in matter or in spirit.
What do I “think” of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: I don’t think of him. And the more I see, the less I think.
Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom! It must be true to its own idea, have its own form, and serve its own purpose!
I used to call people, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone.
Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money...
Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.
I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Rights are not a matter of numbers – and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.