Nature's law, That man was made to mourn. Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn! O Death, the poor man's dearest friend, The kindest and the best!
It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.
I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.
It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.
It's not put into his head to be buried. It's put into his head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.
If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude.
I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won't let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it; I'll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so - I'll beat myself.
Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
Men of success meet with tragedy. It was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily.