She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.