Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people’s assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.
Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.
Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.
Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.
The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.
Facts are counterrevolutionary.
Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.
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.
It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
There is a time when the word “eventually” has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.
Man’s chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.
It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.