The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.

I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.

You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact. It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts. Your whole lifetime spent at nothing else would not tell all the facts of one morning in your life, just any ordinary morning when you get up, dress, get breakfast and wash the dishes. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts to illustrate it.

Making the best of things is... a damn poor way of dealing with them. My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.