Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.

We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.

I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.

I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.

When I said 'we', officer, I was referring to myself, the four young ladies, and, of course, the goat.

My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.

Why, when people are starving, am I on a carpet that's red? Because I'm "important"? Because I'm "famous"? That's not how I roll.

Pizza! Hockey! Destroy!" -Cal

Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear: the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.

Numbers have life; they’re not just symbols on paper.