To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

I was born in Europe… and I’ve traveled all over the world. I can tell you that there is no place, no country, that is more compassionate, more generous, more accepting, and more welcoming than the United States of America.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

I really miss having a routine because now I’ve been on the road constantly for several months. I like routines, so it would be nice to get those routines back.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

What we live by we die by.

The only black battalion on Iwo Jima was a small munitions supply unit that came to the beach.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

I was a very average player and became a trainer in Germany with a special club.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

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.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity.

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.

In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

I love Africa, and Ulusaba, our home in South Africa, is pretty special. It’s on a rocky hill overlooking the bush, and from your room, you can see lions stalking zebras by the waterhole.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Time is the only critic without ambition.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them – lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

If you’d have said Evangelical in 1957, most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. And then, they’d be against it.

It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

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

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.