Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

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.

those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust us to live in them. Trying to keep the law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control

Harsh winters precede pleasant springs.

A nod from a lord is a breakfast for a fool.

The only person who was a strong public opponent of the war in Iraq is Barack Obama. The other people weren't. So I can understand why all the left is mad, because they're being shut out.

I see you over there, just clinging to the wall. Because they told you like ivy you were bound to crawl. But you kept looking up, girl, and I know why. You knew someday you were gonna touch the sky.

The principal role of the President of the United States is the security of the country and participating in trying to stabilize the world.

Art is the image of life, it's purpose simply to enhance it.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

Basic Instincts It's the way mother birds build nests, and build them high enough to elude

But no one came. Because no one ever does.