Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.

A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.

Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.

As WArden Lawes once said of convicts, no man can be called a failure until he has tried something he really likes, and fails at it.

The principal difference between love and hate is that love is a irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.