Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

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.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

When I reached 80, my world turned upside down physically. I’ve had a lot of physical problems.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

I just don’t have time to get old!

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.

Youth is wasted on the young.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics. I think perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics.

As long as possible, I would really like to complete one marathon per year. Though my time has been slowing down as I get older, it has become a very important part of my life.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

I have 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they keep me young.

It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‚star‘ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn’t mean that we must grow weaker spiritually.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

I think one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.

Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.