At one o’clock in the morn­ing I sat in my car, en­gine id­ling and lights turned off. Across the gravel road my dad walked through the bare dirt and rus­ted met­al of an ex-con’s yard. Dad was sil­hou­et­ted by a dim porch bulb that hung from the eaves of the trail­er. He set a pack­age on the hood of a pickup truck parked some yards short of the porch, turned around, and walked back to­ward...

Among say­ings that have a cur­rency in spite of be­ing wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon an­oth­er sub­ject which is ac­ci­dent­ally com­bined with the er­ror, one of the grossest and broad­est con­veys the mon­strous pro­pos­i­tion that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heart­ily it were. But the truth...

I am writ­ing a book for my son. It’s a book about everything. It’s pretty long. There’s a ton of stuff I want to tell him. But he’s six so I fig­ure he can’t un­der­stand a lot of it now – things I want to tell him about sex, drugs, philo­sophy, and the value of edu­ca­tion. And by the time he is old enough to un­der­stand he’ll be in his early teens and will be way too em­bar­rassed even to...

I will give you a talis­man. Re­call the face of the poorest and weak­est man whom you may have seen, and ask your­self if the step you con­tem­plate is go­ing to be of any use to him. Will he gain any­thing by it? Will it re­store him to a con­trol over his own life and des­tiny? Will it lead to swa­raj [free­dom] for the hungry and spir­itu­ally starving mil­lions?...

How selfish so­ever man may be sup­posed, there are evid­ently some prin­ciples in his nature, which in­terest him in the for­tune of oth­ers, and render their hap­pi­ness ne­ces­sary to him, though he de­rives noth­ing from it ex­cept the pleas­ure of see­ing it. Of this kind is pity or com­pas­sion, the emo­tion which we feel for the misery of oth­ers,...