If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

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

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

I love being in the United States Senate.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

I like policy. It’s why I decided to enter government. The other thing I like about government – you have good days, you have bad days, but you never have a boring day, and that’s important to me.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

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

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

Stay active. Read the Word. Worship with other believers. Continue to give. Keep learning and growing. Your faith will be unleashed!

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves. That’s why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

All impeachments, I guess, are political.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.