The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing--that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator.

The good-they cannot create; they are always the beginning of the end.

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.