The forest fleer has been expelled from society, the anarch has expelled society from himself. He is and remains his own master in all circumstances. When he decides to flee to the forest, his decision...

Es ist wichtig zu begreifen, dass wir der Toleranz nicht dienen, wenn wir unser Profil verwässern, sondern indem wir uns umgekehrt unserer eigenen Werte wieder vergewissern. […] Wir tun der Toleranz auch nichts Böses an,...

Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of...

A society with values, is a rich society.

Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same?

It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams...

Jenna, standing in the doorway with her mouth and hand full of shelled pistachios, says, ‘”Real’ is a dirty word in this place’.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country…we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Toujours et partout on peut résumer la situation initiale en termes d’une crise qui fait peser sur la communauté et son système culturel une menace de destruction totale. Cette crise est presque toujours résolue par...

Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male...

In a materialistic society, there’s no such a thing as a ‘romantic’ broke man.

There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities

Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.

Blessed are the peacemakers? Billed are the warmongers, and then you shall have peace.

Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people...

In civilized societies, if you are offended by a cartoon, you do not burn flags, take up guns and raid buildings, chant death to your opponents, or threaten suicide bombings. You write a letter to...

Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.”[Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek,...

I make sacrifices in reward of trinkets for my gilded cage.

Spontaneous insanity is the real bliss! It’s sad that we are honored for playing sane, serious, safe, miserable and controlling in this poor world.

Whenever you get a traumatic event happening in society, you tend to see certain reactions to it, such as irritability, depression, confused thinking and sleep problems, … In that context, rational decision-making becomes very difficult....

I think it’s quite depressing that people never realize the true beauty of self-destruction; That people are too busy trying to fit the image of perfection than to come to reality with the fact that...

Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind...

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or,...

Nous sommes nés en des temps de chaos, où chacun a l’esprit confus. On voudrait rester à l’écart de ce monde de fous, mais ce serait refuser sa part de butin.

It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.

But then I stopped allowing myself to dream, because it was more painful to long for things and never get them than to deal with whatever was in front of me. […] I’m too old...

Because in the end, we die. It’s like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: ‘in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here.

His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency...

Technologies that change society are technologies that change interactions between people

A leader is not just a person who gives orders. He is also the one who symbolises the society he leads. If the leader is corrupt, then the society must be corrupt too.

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until...

io, mio caro, non credo nell’amore universale. L’amore esiste in dosi modiche. Si possono amare forse cinque fra uomini e donne, dieci magari, talvolta financo quindici. E anche questo solo assai di rado. Ma se...

They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.—written for the Pennsylvania Assembly in its Reply to the Governor, 11 November 1755

Politics divides a nation, instead of bringing its people together.

We’re all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

A new question for the psychotherapist to ask is whether a theory can go beyond mere effectiveness in achieving either a so-called cure or even personal growth into its implications for the nature of an...

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason...

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science....

It’s a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it’s bound to, this will be the one act you’ll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest...

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.

Always write to change society for the better.You will go, but it will live as a treasure forever.

The fact is, rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if it’s something shocking and extraordinary whenever it hits the...

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such...

Don’t be surprised that I value prejudice, observe certain conventions, seek power–it’s because I know I live in an empty society.

Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee.The teevee debilitates our culture.