History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

History, a distillation of rumour.

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

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

One of the amazing things about ‚Seven Samurai‘ is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you’ve got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

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

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

The lies of the empire and the treason of the quislings shall be defeated.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

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

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

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

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I personally do not think I’m a great gift to the world. I’ve been very fortunate.

Here’s what I believe, I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in the history of the world but i think there was some bad apples over there.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

I wish every American had an opportunity to sit down, to go to a base, to meet with families, to meet with service members, to sit down with our veterans – because we would think differently about our challenges as individuals.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

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