No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

Those who can't teach - administrate. Those who can't administrate - go into politics.

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.

All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.