The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual; everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort.

You don't build for the way people live, but for the way they should live. I don't write about people as they are, but as they could be and should be.

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

I sat there beside him till morning - and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved... I did not expect it to be as great as this - or as hard.

Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.