Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.