Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.

Quarreling over food and drink, having neither scruples nor shame, not knowing right from wrong, not trying to avoid death or injury, not fearful of greater strength or of greater numbers, greedily...

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

People ask what the advantages are of wearing a mask, and the first thing, of course, is the mystery - people don't know exactly what Kane is thinking.

Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.

Everybody has flaws, and every country has flaws. But you can still love something even though you know it's been so wrong before, and sometimes is now, and probably will be again.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

How sad it is that these great gentlemen should believe what anyone tells them and do not choose to judge for themselves! But it is always so.

I knew exactly what to do on Alien, it was funny.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

It's always more interesting to take on someone that's going to have hidden sides or a fatal flaw, because there's going to be more to play with - more conflict, internally or in and around them - but...

In the military, you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice and moral courage. In the rest of life, you don't get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.

Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

As concerns the question of the psychological engine that drove Hitler, the conventional interpretation of lusting after power is, in final analysis, the refuge of lack of understanding.

God didn't create monsters. Monsters created themselves.

Probably no one alive hasn't at one time or another brooded over the possibility of going back to an earlier ideal age in his existence and living a different kind of life.

Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.

There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no...

There is no man in any rank who is always at liberty to act as he would incline; he is limited by circumstances.

Men are men they needs must err.