The thoughts, beliefs, and emotions we don’t consciously reject, we unconsciously accept.

As you and I march across the decades of time, we are going to meet a lot of unpleasant situations that are so. They cannot be otherwise. We have our choice. We can either accept them as inevitable and adjust ourselves to them, or we can ruin our lives with rebellion and maybe end up with a nervous breakdown.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

But unfortunately, decent people are usually slow to act and ignore dangers until a crisis erupts. They are sluggish and willing to abide with peace without honor, but their own inaction causes them to lose both.

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.

Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll any stones out of his way, and must calmly accept his lot even if they roll a few more into it.

Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it’s easier to get used to it than carve it out.

See, most civilians don’t understand that you need a certain level of callousness to do the job we were being trained to do. To live in a brutal world, you have to accept cold-blooded truths.

"I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness to offend people. And as a result there are whole tribes of people now who define themselves by their offendedness. I mean, who are you if you are not offended by anything? You're kind of nobody or even worse, you are a liberal. And I just think that whole business defining yourself by anger is very problematic. And then the fact that we all kind of bend over backwards not to induce that anger becomes very often also a problem and a kind of cowardice, if you like. And I think we just need to live in a more robust society in which people say things that other people don't like and the answer to that is not to throw a bomb at them, but to say "I don't like that much" and then get on with the next business."

For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.

Civilizirani ljudi neugodniji su od divljaka zato što znaju da mogu biti nepristojni, a da im zbog toga netko ne raspolovi glavu.

"Such are the vicissitudes of life," Tuf said, "that each of us must sometimes accept that which he does not like."

Bug, meanwhile, had learned at Marshtown that might made right, and he got older and paler, his head downcast like a nodding flower that expects itself to be cut at any moment.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.