All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Science is nothing but perception.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

I’m actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, ‚Man, I said too much.‘ It’s hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

The more you know the less you need to say.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

Mastery, I learned, was not something genetic, or for a lucky few. It is something we can all attain if get rid of some misconceptions and gain clarity as to the required path.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

There is no education like adversity.

If we had more hell in the pulpit, we would have less hell in the pew.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs?

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Philosophy is the highest music.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

Well, I was 29 years old when I came to the United States Senate, and I have learned a lot.