“We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger.”

Source: First Things First (1994), p. 167

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.65

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 283
Context: We are ignorant of the laws of variety-production; but we see it going on as a principle in nature, and it is obviously favorable to the supposition that all the great families of men are of one stock.

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter V, Conditional Probability, Stochastic Independence, p. 130

Discourse Delivered at the Royal Society (30 November 1825), published in Six Discourses delivered before the Royal Society, at their Anniversary Meetings, on the Award of the Royal and Copley Medals, preceded by an Address to the Society on the Progress and Prospects of Science (1827); also in The Edinburgh Review Or Critical Journal (October 1827)
Context: Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.

Letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1830)