You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Education is important because it prepares you for life.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

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.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

The press is the enemy.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Facts are stubborn things.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

When a family film is done well, there’s a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

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.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

The more you know the less you need to say.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

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

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

It’s different from being 21 and you think there’s endless amount of opportunities. At 33, the ending is much, much closer.

There is so much that people take for granted.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.