General Sayings

Action, not contemplation, is the highest human faculty.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting of nothing but jokes.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

A man's life is nothing but a slow trek to death.

Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated.

For a man who wishes to make a profession of good in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.

It is not the young people that degenerate; they are only rather thoughtless: the old ones are corrupt.

The deaf should not intermarry.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

I can think of nothing else than this machine.

The being who can govern itself, has an empire which the most despotic monarch cannot boast.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory.

Ignorance of these particulars about oneself means that no one is able to tailor principles to his own advantage.

There are no such things as 'rights' for animals.

Civilization began the first time an angry man cast a stone instead of a word.