Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it yours.

We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought, no more, tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe.

What could not be denied was that in vast segments of the animal world natural selection of the most qualified individuals took place not by competition for females but by competition for space.

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

The Beatles looked like they were in show business, and that was the important thing. And the important thing for the Rolling Stones was to look as if they were not.

Maybe where there's clarity of air, there's clarity of thought.

To be extremely self-centred, only interested in your own satisfaction, always brings negative consequences in the long run.

It will be practicable to blot written words which you do not publish; but the spoken word it is not possible to recall. [Lat., Delere licebit Quod non edideris; nescit vox missa reverti.]

Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.

The true religion has always been one from the beginning, and will always be the same.