To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that’s real power.
Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.
But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work.
People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been – for a moment’s relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
We are all brothers under the skin – and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.
You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated.
I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.
She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.
A culture is made – or destroyed – by its articulate voices.
You don’t have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is–say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.