I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.

Silence is a true friend who never betrays.

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

My mom and I have always been really close. She’s always been the friend that was always there. There were times when, in middle school and junior high, I didn’t have a lot of friends. But my mom was always my friend. Always.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

It is fun to be in the same decade with you.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

OVOXO will always be there.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

I gave my archive to Emory University because there’s a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he’s the editor.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

I live in a crazy time.

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort, we ought to be happy in our brother’s happiness.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. It will be a strong friend of Israel’s under a McCain administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel’s under an Obama administration. So that policy is not going to change.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.