The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.