If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords. Lords without anger and honor, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labor and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them. They have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne. Americans do not need to drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing.

Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.