Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‚forever young at heart.‘

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

They are resilient children, but they are children, and as much as they need help to understand the hard truths in life, they also need what we all need – protection and love.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

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.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

I’m the first to admit this whole salary thing is getting out of control. In the final analysis, it’s still about the work.

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

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

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.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Every wall is a door.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

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.