What could not be denied was that in vast segments of the animal world natural selection of the most qualified individuals took place not by competition for females but by competition for space.

Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it yours.

We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe.

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.

Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.

The only thing that ever came close to tugging my heart strings is music. I know this because that is the only time I've felt them move.

For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

We need to ask ourselves a question: Do we trust God? Is he not the same yesterday, today, and forever? And if he is, then how is compromise a strategy? It's not a strategy, it's wholesale surrender.

Words and deeds are far from being one. Much that is talked about is left undone.

Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life.

No matter what you're going through, as long as you have some specific emotion, whether it's positive or negative, it is all stuff that you can use on stage.

It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.

I've probably failed more often than anybody else in Silicon Valley. Those don't matter. I don't remember the failures. You remember the big successes.