When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

How can a president not be an actor?

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

I have all the admiration in the world for somebody like Bono, who really puts himself on the line and tries actively to do something about our world situation.

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

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.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

There is probably a perverse pride in my administration… that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.

If proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.

Life is wasted on the living.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

We have lived long enough to experience the hollowness of earth and the rottenness of all carnal promises.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

I have been a firm believer in the federal structure of our country as enshrined in the Constitution.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.

I don’t like politicians, and I don’t like politics. I definitely don’t want to be associated with any of them.

We moralize among ruins.

I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I’m telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy!

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

I am really proud that I am one of the artists that has the opportunity to be on magazine covers and to be in the movies.

Facts are not liberals‘ strong suit. Rhetoric is.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

I’m the only president you’ve got.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

Looking back on the production of ‚Nevermind,‘ I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

I have decided in 2020 to run for president.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.