Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.

The State calls its own violence, law; but that of the individual, crime.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.

Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man.

We don't call it sin today, we call it self-expression.

Religion itself is without genius. There is no religious genius and no one would be permitted to distinguish between the talented and the untalented in religion.

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.

If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!

A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.

Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.

The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic

For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.

everybody-even monsters-needed a little attention once in a while.

For my part, I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use.

Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.

I would rather have someone read my diary than look at my iPod playlists.