When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.

Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.

The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.

He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.

An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano.

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

Mouse likes to drag you to uninhabited areas with no cell signal—all those places perfect for dying of exposure.

Man's many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weight him down.

My instinct was to win, eliminate anyone who is in competition, destroy my enemy and move on without any kind of hesitation at all.

If I had to go to war again, I'd bring lacrosse players.

Our hopes, desires and ambitions are powerful forces existing within us for the shaping of the future. They are the generating forces that create the future.

Success is not a destination that you ever reach. Success is the quality of your journey.

The distance between a gene and a behavior is of greatest interest to me. The relative contributions of nature and nurture, of nucleotide and nuclear family, are perpetually fascinating to me.

When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, have you grown old.