What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.

My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.