Pride

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.

Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

[ Explaining his resignation from the Hollywood chapter of the Friars Club :] I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god but who knows my god?

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

In architecture the pride of man his triumph over gravitation his will to power assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.

Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

Knowing one's 'individuality'. - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression that we make.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.

One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior