Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.
The terrorist lives for terror, not for the change he tells himself he wants. He masks his desire to kill and destroy behind the curtain of a cause. It is destruction he wants, not creation.
Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.
There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.
You can make laws against weapons but they will be observed only by those who don’t intend to use them anyway. The lawless can always smuggle or steal or even make a gun. By refusing to wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity.
Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.
Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king.
Laws are made to free people, not to bind them – if they are the proper laws. They tell each of us what he may do without transgressing on the equal liberty of any other man.
I’ve noticed... that whenever a man is asked to be realistic he is being asked to betray something in which he believes. It is the favorite argument of those who believe that only the end matters, not the means.
He is a fool who will descend into a well on another man’s rope.
A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.
It is this by which we measure a man, by what he does with his life, by what he creates to leave behind. – Louis L’Amour.
To survive? What is that? A mouse lives, a fly lives; one flees in terror, another lives in filth. They exist, they are, but do they live?
I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.
Every morning is a beginning, a fresh start, and a man needn’t be hog-tied to the past. Whatever went before, a man’s life can begin now, today.
A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.
Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Nobody is ever convinced by argument, anyway. They just think up new reasons for maintaining old positions and become more defensive.
Most men never discover what they’ve got inside. A man has to face up to trouble before he knows.
Avoid conflict and trouble, for enough of it fetches to a man without his asking.