People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.

The goal of an artist is to create the definitive work that cannot be surpassed.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

Principles without programs are platitudes.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.