Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president… is morally treasonable to the American public.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

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.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

A witty saying proves nothing.

I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

America is just downright mean.

Industry need not wish.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

The point – the power to hurt – of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Don’t judge other people. For example, if you want God’s anointing to be on you for parenting, you need to be careful not to criticize other parents.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

There’s backlash about everything I do.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.

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.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

If you judge, investigate.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don’t want my chefs to be cute and adorable.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.