No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending – that’s the whole point! Seriously.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

A BMW can’t take you as far as a diploma.

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

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

I have made a few mistakes early on that I admit myself, and there have been times when I have gone over the top and done things that you shouldn’t do in international cricket, but that’s how you learn.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

The more you know the less you need to say.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

The only bipartisanship you ever see is when they finally sign a bill and everybody says, ‚Gee, isn’t that wonderful?‘

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Man is a universe within himself.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The method of instruction in Scouting is that of creating in the boy the desire to learn for himself.

I’m going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we’ve had in a couple of hundred years.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don’t understand why it’s the government’s responsibility.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

There might be some serious fun in politics.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.