The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.

How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

There is no come back to caves. We are too many.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.

It’s extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

A man is great by deeds, not by birth.

A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man.

Johnny Cash has always been larger than life.

If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

Progress of mankind is progress of mind and intellect.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

I despise people who depend on these things [heroin and cocaine]. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.

Human history is in essence a history of ideas.