I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

I don’t want to make money; I want to make a difference.

Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when first I considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn’t any good reason to refer to it.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

Without gambling, I would not exist.

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

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, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

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.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I’m really thinking about.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.