War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

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.

The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

Most self-employed people remain slaves to the employed’s working hours.

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?

I knew 'Like Crazy' would be good, I just knew it, and that's why I fought so hard to be on it.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day.

I never had a real job either. I sort of fell out of school and ended up playing guitar.