I go to scale the Future’s possibilities! Farewell!
Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing.
Mrs LINDE: When you’ve sold yourself once for the sake of others, you don’t do it second time.
It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.
I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.
Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself – thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.
The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing.
The starving poet business is no good nowadays.
The worst that a man can do to himself is to do injustice to others.
I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.
Oh yes, right – right. What is the use of having right on your side if you have not got might?
There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.
I’m afraid for all those who’ll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
Don’t use that foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have that excellent native word ‘lies.’
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,’ merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.
In great memories there lies the seed of growth.
Oh, yes – you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side – unfortunately; but right it has not.
It’s a release to know that in spite of everything a premeditated act of courage is still possible.