“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.”

“... the typical worker who through the whole of his life...pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility...It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

“Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.”

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. ”

“The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.”

“Human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of pre-potency. That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal. Also no need or drive can be treated as if it were isolated or discrete; every drive is related to the state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of other drives. 8.”

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”

Man is the child of customs, not the child of his ancestors.

Man is essentially ignorant, and becomes learned through acquiring knowledge.

"If one man can destroy everything, why can't one girl change it?"

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole

A man of character will make himself worthy of any position he is given.

Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.

To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.

Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.

Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or loneliness. It consists in daring to do the right thing and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other. It consists in deeds not words.

It is easier to build a boy than to mend a man.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.

A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

I want to be here for a long time, so I am going to do everything I have to do to be here. And I want to walk my daughter down the aisle and give her away to somebody some day. I want to make sure I am still here to make sure my two young [sons] become men.

My diet is mostly chicken and fish. I make sure I get a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruit. I am a big fruit man, I am a vegetable man anyway. And I also get a lot of rest. That's the key I may be up early, but I'm in bed early too.