What is to give light must endure burning.

If from Society we learn to live Tis Solitude should teach us how to die; It hath no flatterers.

In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell... we can't dance synonyms.

Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

Effective action is always unjust.

You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.

I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Freedom is from within.

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be.

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

I don't do drugs, I am drugs

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?

True valor lies between cowardice and rashness.

Charity ... is the opium of the privileged.

Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.