The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

If you are still breathing, don not stop learning.

As a vampire, you must accept that every person you ever know will die, and you are the only constant in your life, the only person you can—and should—rely on.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

Marriage is commonly a meal wherein the soup is better than the desert.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Attainment is a poor measure of capacity, and ignorance no proof of defect.

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

Have a baby, and you realize: The second you think you got sh-t figured out, you don't. It's the greatest wake-up call.

Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire brings a small amount of heat.

I love all the things there are, and of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one; and that's why I go from life to life.