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• Brandy and water spoils two good things.

• Truth is sometimes stranger than fact.

• Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans.

• "Delay in justice is injustice."

• Articulation is an indispensable tool we use for the advancement of our mostly tacit understanding of the world.
• ...both the property rights that permit separate owners to use their resources as they see fit and the intellectual freedom that permits scientists to adhere to theories of their choice play the same roles. To the extent that either form of personal commitment is undermined--when scientific reputation or economic wealth depends on loyalty to a party line rather than to a personal devotion to truth or a pursuit of anticipated profit opportunities--each of these great achievements of civilization, science and our advanced economy, is to that degree sabotaged.
• It makes no more sense to plan the total quantity of sheet metal an economy should produce than it would for a chess team captain to plan to have his team move twenty bishops by an average of three squares. The reason both of these plans are nonsensical is that they treat aggregate summaries of detailed decisions apart from the context of the decisions themselves.
• Actually it appears that one of the things the corporations do that most irritates advocates of economic democracy is to cater to the demands of consumers. Despite all the rhetoric against the corporate elite and in favor of democratized, decentralized control over our own lives, and so on, most of these writers reveal a deeply ingrained bias against the actual tastes of the consuming public.

• Sin is a queer thing. It isn't the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one's own integrity.

• Now, nature, as I am only too well aware, has her enthusiasts, but on the whole, I am not to be counted among them. To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land--I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel. This state of affairs is partially due to the fact that nature and I have so little in common. We don't go to the same restaurants, laugh at the same jokes or, most significant, see the same people.
• First of all, nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs. Secondly, for fully half of the time it is day out there, a situation created by just the sort of harsh overhead lighting that is so unflattering to the heavy smoker. Lastly, and most pertinent to this discourse, is the fact that natural things are by their very definition wild, unkempt and more often than not crawling with bugs. Quite obviously, then, natural things are just the kind of things that one does not strive to acquire.
• I understand, of course, that many people find smoking objectionable. That is their right. I would, I assure you, be the very last to criticize the annoyed. I myself find many--even most--things objectionable. Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one's home. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs. In private I avoid such people; in public they have the run of the place. I stay at home as much as possible, and so should they. When it is necessary, however, to go out of the house, they must be prepared, as I am, to deal with the unpleasant personal habits of others. That is what "public" means. If you can't stand the heat, get back in the kitchen.

• Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

• "Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong..."
  "They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

• Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.
• War I abhor, and yet how sweet the sound along the marching street of drum and fife, and I forget wet eyes of widows, and forget broken old mothers, and the whole dark butchery without a soul.

• I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

• While the state exists there is no freedom. Where there is freedom, there will be no state.

• Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

• The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

• Live and let live is the rule of common justice.

• Strip the phony tinsel off Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

• we can do as we please but not please as we please.
• a self-determining will is inherently obscure. It invites but cannot answer the question of what makes such a will determine itself to choose one way rather than another. Not external factors, for then the will is not self-determining. Not nothing, for a will acting by chance is not self-determining. Not a prior act of the will to choose its choice, for that launches an infinite regress. These alternatives exhausted, a self-determining will is impossible, and should such a will be necessary for desert, no one deserves anything at all.
• Apparently, morality is absolutist in everyday circumstances, teleological in emergencies, and in each context blind to the other alternative. This blindness itself is probably adaptive: rules couldn't do their everyday job of maximizing adaptive behavior if people thought of them as less than absolute, yet it would also be maladaptive to cling to rules on those rare occasions when doing so would be catastrophic. We are of two minds, and there the matter ends.

• World prosperity requires world trade.

• Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercized for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

• If I had the power that the New Testament narrative says Jesus had, I would not cure one person of blindness, I would make blindness impossible; I would not cure one person of leprosy, I would abolish leprosy.

• God--personified incomprehensibility.

• An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.

• These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.
• Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there such a thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
• If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
• The sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.
• I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights.
• If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
• No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
• Well for those who like that kind of thing I should think that is the just about the sort of thing they would like.

• When all think alike, then no-one is thinking.
• He [H. L. Mencken] calls you a swine and an imbecile and he increases your will to live.

• Since they resist tyranny in behalf of law and moral order they are in no sense rebels. The oppressive government alone is guilty of rebellion and treason.
• The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

• Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way round.

• Our anger embodies a judgment that what the terrorists did on September 11th was wrong. But what was it that they did? They rained down death from the skies upon innocent civilians in order to express a grievance against our government. If, in the anger of our military response, we are heedless of the lives of innocent civilians in Afghanistan or elsewhere, then, in the name of our anger, we will have infringed the very principle that our anger is supposed to be expressing: we will be the ones raining down death from the skies upon innocent civilians in order to express a grievance against their government. Those who answer directly to their blood often end up having a lot of blood to answer for.

• A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.
• With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought.
• We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
• Look then, into thine own heart and write!

• I believe I've found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

• Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.

• No good deed goes unpunished.

• Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but--more frequently than not--struggles against the divine World, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.

• Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along.

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