The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

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.

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

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

When you are searching for knowledge, knowledge is also searching for you.

I don't believe in God. My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

If so many Americans are looking for the government to save them, then it is hard to have a dignified search for a shepherd in chief.

The power of art is the power of truth.

Those that reach their goals perish.

If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.

It requires but little acquaintance with the heart to know that woman's first wish is to be handsome; and that, consequently, the readiest method of obtaining her kindness is to praise her beauty.