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

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people to exclude slavery, voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

I think, in many people’s minds, the Confederate battle flag is not only a memorial to our ancestors, which is perfectly OK, but also a symbol of white superiority and an inclination for people to believe that even slavery would’ve been OK.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

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

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

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

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

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

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

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

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.

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

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

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

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

The racing is quite boring, sometimes. It’s hard to see how it pulls in fans.

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.

When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

If you judge, investigate.

I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

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

You can always tell when a man’s well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

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.

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

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