From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It’s experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

There’s one advantage in having been around as long as I have. Everybody in the Senate knows me, and – I’m going to say something presumptuous, to repeat myself – I think most respect me.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

I had a much better view with the halo than I expected.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.

Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

A lot of the stuff I do in terms of PR, I learned it from Muhammad Ali.