Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

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.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do – eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other… and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

I only change things where I know about a situation. I’d never change just for change.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.

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.

I think America has always been polarized.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

It’s amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

The reason why I wear gold – I wear gold for three reasons. One, when Jesus was born, three wise men came from the east: one brought frankincense, one brought myrrh, the other one brought gold. The second reason I wear gold is I can afford it. The third reason I wear it, it’s symbolic of my African heritage.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics. I think perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

There are some loony people in this world!

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

I think one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.