Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

All art is quite useless.

History should be written as philosophy.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

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

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.

Here comes 40. I’m feeling my age and I’ve ordered the Ferrari. I’m going to get the whole mid-life crisis package.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

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

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Experts often possess more data than judgment.

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

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.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

What I invest in, while not risky for me, may be too risky for most people.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

I’ve never wanted to use my age as a gimmick, as something that would get me ahead of other people. I’ve wanted the music to do that.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.