In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

Man is a universe within himself.

I love people talking about me; I love anybody just looking at me.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

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

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I hear my friends and my mom tell me I’m special, but honestly, I still don’t get it.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

I’m all about evolution. I’m the first person to judge myself.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

Maybe ‚loner‘ is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed being on my own.

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

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

The artist part of me always wants to be appreciated. I read every review. But I never wanted to seek validation by awards or anything controlled by politics.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

Nothing can be by itself alone, no one can be by himself or herself alone, everyone has to inter-be with every one else. That is why, when you look outside, around you, you can see yourself.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

And, honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

A man’s own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.

I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.