I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, ….

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made.

Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prov….

Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or th….

The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men….

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated..

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else ….

One must look at what impiety hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth..

We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss..

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to g….

When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed..

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep..

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs..

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning ….

The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His ….

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inn….

When one is engaged in a desperate defense of one's world and its values, nothing can be given away, any breach in the walls might be fatal, every po….

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positiv….

But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat the….

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist..

If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and o….