I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

Those who have a true understanding of America know that we have no desire for territorial expansion, for economic or other domination of other peoples. Such purposes are repugnant to our ideals of human freedom.

If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely – the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears – when you give your whole attention to it.

He incurs a fearful amount of guilt who in the least promotes the aim of the Evil One by trampling upon a tender conscience in a child.

Duty cannot exist without faith.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Only the educated are free.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

When the players go home, I can’t tell them what to do, so you need to create an atmosphere of trust. I don’t want to think, ‚What are they doing now? Do I need to call them?‘

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Freedom is relative.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

If we are not free, no one will respect us.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.