Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

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.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

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

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.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

A witty saying proves nothing.

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

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

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

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

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

History should be written as philosophy.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

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

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

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

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

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.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

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

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

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

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