The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

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

How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

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

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God-the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.