I bought a gun and chose drugs instead.

Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

When in doubt tell the truth.

To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.

Since the team understands that the leader is de facto in charge, in that respect, a leader has nothing to prove. But in another respect, a leader has everything to prove: Every member of the team must develop the trust and confidence that their leader will exercise good judgment, remain calm, and make the right decisions when it matters most.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I think that there is never an indispensable leader, you know? I think that there is a time with dignity that one needs to leave.

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.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

People are unaware of what is going on. When I talk to people, they know the basics, they know the planet is warming because of greenhouse gases… but they don’t know the actual consequence of that.

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.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

A ‚No‘ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‚Yes‘ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

You do the policy, I’ll do the politics.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Finality is not the language of politics.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

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.

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

Political courage is not political suicide.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.

I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

I thought ‚Heller‘ was a very bad decision.

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

We should work with the principle that a work that can be done at a lower level should never be escalated to a higher level.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‚Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path?‘ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good.

I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.

Every sin is the result of a collaboration.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Those who cry out that the government should ‚do something‘ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.

When in doubt, don’t.

Sin, also for those who don’t have faith, exists when one goes against one’s conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

Wise kings generally have wise counselors; and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.