The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

There are some loony people in this world!

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

I sincerely hope I can contribute to the progress there has been in relations between Jews and Catholics since the Second Vatican Council in a spirit of renewed collaboration.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I’m not a reality-TV kind of guy. But it’s almost like we’re living in a reality show. Every day in this country, everybody keeps worrying about the deterioration of America, and it’s like a big reality show.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‚Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.‘

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Every artist was first an amateur.

If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

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.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.