I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

If I think too hard about a relationship, I’ll talk myself out of it.

There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.

I always tell people that if I move anywhere it would be Toronto.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

I took the vow of celibacy in 1906. I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of making the vow. She had no objection.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Never find fault with the absent.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

Basketball is my passion, I love it. But my family and friends mean everything to me. That’s what’s important. I need my phone so I can keep in contact with them at all times.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

In my neighborhood, when you’ve got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

The more you know the less you need to say.

If you want to have sustained joy, you have to not only make sure that you think right, but you also have to make decisions now that are going to guarantee some joy in the future.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

One must steer, not talk.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens.

If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

I’m very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn’t choose.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

When I got somethin‘ to say, I’ll say it.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

If I want to do well in racing I need to be more focused so I stopped going to school. If I wasn’t a very good driver it would not be a wise decision, but it gives me an advantage over my competitors.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

When I left the University of Notre Dame, I honestly felt I would never coach again.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

I always wanted to do things right and represent myself as somebody that took the art serious and someone that took the business serious also, so I had time to weigh the options and figure it out and do my best to create the situation that was ideal.

I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.

If I lost my job, I’d get a job at McDonald’s.