To be seduced by Orators, as a Monarch by Flatterers.

A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad... but because man is by nature more individualistic than social.

Hell is truth seen too late.

Humans are driven by a perpetual and restless desire of power.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

How could a state be governed, or protected in its foreign relations if every individual remained free to obey or not to obey the law according to his private opinion.

Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

...and I was afraid because I knew I had outgrown my past before I could see a path to my future.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

What the homosexual wants, and here he is neither willing to compromise nor morally required to compromise — is acceptance of homosexuality as a way of life fully on a par with heterosexuality.

Don't talk about things you don't like. Talk about music that you love, books that you've read. I put a lot of recipes online.

Talking doom and gloom all day no longer fit who I was as a person.

The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.

The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation.

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

Idleness is paralysis.