The difference between a good and great officer is about ten seconds.
Our judgment will always suspect those weapons that can be used with equal prospect of success on both sides.
If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.
He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
The first duty of man is to take none of the principles of conduct upon trust; to do nothing without a clear and individual conviction that it is right to be done.
Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
As I now feel, I would wish to be borne off anywhere out of this world.
One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.
I've found that giving 100% to your job isn't the same as giving 100% of your life to your job. Very often when I thought I was giving 100% of my life to my job, I was simply obsessing over something.