The mind can never foresee its own advance

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.

Freedom necessarily means that many things will be done which we do not like.

Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

It is be­cause freedom means the renun­ciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravestthreat to it.

The passionate heart touches the sky. The meditative mind enters it.

You arrange your life based on what "everyone" thinks of you or what you think they think of you, whoever everyone is...

Who knows until we experience it? I think that heaven and reincarnation are both ways of making us feel better about what happens to people's souls after death. I hope at least one of them is true.

Obviously it’s hard for anyone to imagine, but these dance halls were powder kegs just waiting to erupt. Names were made and reputations were enhanced or blown in a flash!

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.

Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.

I don't like to make my life like a book.

I am always nostalgic being in New York. Every neighborhood represents something to me. I lived here until I was 60 years old or so. So it was my life.