I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

If you judge, investigate.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

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

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

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.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

There is no gambling like politics.

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

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

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

That the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

The Second Amendment is just as important as all the other Amendments.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you. I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

Children make your life important.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

I live in Puerto Rico, my family lives in Puerto Rico, my friends. What happens in Puerto Rico matters to me.

Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

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

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

Academic qualifications are important and so is financial education. They’re both important and schools are forgetting one of them.

Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

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

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

Nutrition is so important. It can’t be stressed enough.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

Each doctor makes a much, much more important job than I do, but at the end, nobody talks about him. We all know about it, but we don’t really think about it.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.