An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

I’ve suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life.

I would probably have more in common with a whale than with a bourgeois married couple employed at worthy institutions that I would wipe from the face of the earth if it was given to me to do so.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror – and America is honored to be their friend.

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything – diseases, spiders… and people getting tired of me.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Politics have no relation to morals.

As a shame researcher, I know that the very best thing to do in the midst of a shame attack is totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out!

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

Our friends at the Republican convention were more than happy to talk about everything they think is wrong with America, but they didn’t have much to say about how they’d make it right. They want your vote, but they don’t want you to know their plan.

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

I get nervous for everything – literally everything.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I will keep America moving forward, always forward, for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand Points of Light. This is my mission, and I will complete it.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.

I have a little bit of PTSD when I hear a big bang or a loud noise or keys – I jump out of my skin.

For many people who are so lost in their minds, so much involved in their thought processes, the only moments they have when they are not trapped in that is when they are relating to their animal, their pet.

We welcome the scrutiny of the world – because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, ‚I don’t have time.‘ But that’s the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.

I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected.

People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Love is a serious mental disease.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.