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The path of our duty is plain before us—honesty will be found on every experiment to be the best and only true policy—let us then as a Nation be just.

I am called a dog. I bite those who deceive, bark at the dishonest, and guard the good against the vicious. I consider this a perfectly respectable description. Men who live in houses, wear gold chains, perform their civic duties and attend their philosophic lectures, and nevertheless lie, cheat, and flatter the powerful — these men I call wolves dressed...

The Meditations were never meant to be published. I wrote them in Greek — not Latin, which was unusual for a Roman emperor — during military campaigns on the Danube frontier. The German tribes were pressing and I was pressing back, and in the evenings I wrote reminders to myself about how to behave.

Do not waste what remains of your life in thoughts about...

Écrasez l'infâme — crush the infamous thing. I signed my letters with this phrase for decades. The infamous thing was fanaticism — religious intolerance, judicial cruelty, the burning of heretics, the torture of Protestants, the execution of Calas. It was specific. It had addresses. It needed to be named before it could be crushed.

They called me the Laughing Philosopher because I found the foolishness of human concerns ridiculous rather than tragic. Money, reputation, political power — the things people torture themselves over — are rearrangements of atoms. The atoms do not care.

I proposed, with my teacher Leucippus, that all matter is composed of indivisible particles moving...

The measure of a man is what he does with power. When Socrates was offered the chance to escape execution by fleeing Athens, he declined — not because he could not leave, but because to leave would have been to deny everything he had argued for forty years about the obligation of citizens to their city and its laws. He had more power in that refusal than...

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience — not from a change in external conditions. I gave up my estate and my title because I could no longer justify them. Not because the world had changed but because I had.

Friendship is nothing else but an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection. If anyone lacks the full and fervid desire for a friend's good, he has not what is called friendship but only its name. For in friendship, one wishes for the friend what one wishes for oneself — not as an instrument, not as a means, but...

My father gave me Macedonia. I shall make it the world. Aristotle taught me what to want from the world. He taught me to love Homer, to memorise the Iliad, and to model myself on Achilles. I always slept with a copy of the Iliad and a dagger under my pillow — one for the mind and one for the morning.

Egypt is the gift of the Nile. Nowhere else does a river transform a land so completely or a civilisation grow so directly from one source of water. The Egyptians keep more religious observances than any other nation and have a memory that stretches further back than I can follow. I wrote down what I saw and what I was told, distinguishing between them...

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries of history look down upon us. I said this in Egypt because I understood that men need to feel they are part of something larger than the current campaign. History is not a backdrop for action. It is an argument for why the action matters.

I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors cannot say: I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger. That sentence is not a boast. It is a record of discipline, secrecy, danger, prayer, and the refusal to turn back.