Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

I’m a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I’ve done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that’s just responsible.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

People only see what they are prepared to see.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

You may say, ‚Well, dragons don’t exist.‘ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‚predator‘ and the category ‚dragon‘ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

It is natural to die as to be born.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

My experience of malaria was just taking anti-malarials, which give you strange dreams, because I don’t want to get malaria.

We fly to 106 kilometers. We’ve always had as our mission that we always wanted to fly above the Karman line because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not.

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

I think Himalayan climbers tend to mature fairly late. I think most of the successful Himalayan climbers have ranged from 28 to just over 40, really.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Keep in mind that no matter how perfectly you get your life in order, you will never be rid of all your problems. Problems are a way of life, always have been, always will be. But how you elect to view those problems is all up to you.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

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.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That’s why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, ‚Bye!‘

Freedom is relative.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

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.

In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘