For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people’s opinions.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

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

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

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.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

This administration is going to be cussed and discussed for years to come.

Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing. Today you are looking at the Taliban or ISIS; tomorrow you might be looking at another name.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

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

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

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.‘

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

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