Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.

Some people take defeat and losses a certain way. You see how some fighters take losses.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

If the critics are right that I’ve made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

If you would judge, understand.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, ‚This is a misfortune‘ but ‚To bear this worthily is good fortune.‘

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can’t compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s free market enthusiasms.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.