1. “The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”
2. “Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”
3. “Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes place of astrology.”
4. “Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
5. “Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
6. “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
7. “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
8. “Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.”
9. “There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.”
10. “The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”
11. “The finest fury is the most controlled.”
12. “The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.”
13. “It’s often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven’t been made.”
14. “What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.”
15. “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
16. “I think materialistic conception of history is valid.”
17. “I make preparations both to live and die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.”
18. “Trust is not same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.”
19. “High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.”
20. “It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.”
21. “The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.”
22. “Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it a gunpoint.”
23. “You can only have one aim per debate.”
24. “There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.”
25. “I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”
26. “Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.”
27. “Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.”
28. “To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.”
29. “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.”
30. “The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.”
