The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

The examined life: nothing is more futile or counterproductive. The active, joyous, spontaneous life: that is what one should aim for.

Survival justifies any means.

Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.

Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair--or the height of a battle against boredom.

what you fear, you invite.

The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

Youth should watch joys and shoot them as they fly.

Texting is not flirting, if you don't care about me enough to say the words than that's not love, I don't like it!

I never grew up dreaming about a wedding - I don't think about things like that. I don't know how to explain it. All I care about is to be happy.