If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

I just figured out that if I gave my all into this game – if I put everything into the fight business – then I would eventually run the fight business.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.

Applause is a receipt, not a bill.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

Freedom is relative.

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

I was a little worried that young people would think the only game was being political and manipulative when really the bigger game is being so good at what you do that nobody can argue with your results.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

My unpredictability is what separates me. If you move in so many ways, your opponent is not focused on what he’s doing. He’s focusing in on what you’re doing, and it freezes him. When they freeze and you hit, they shatter like glass.

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Children are all foreigners.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

I seen a lot of artists be hot for a minute, and then that’s it, and somebody else come in.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

You know, I look like a woman but I think like a man. And in this world of business, that has helped me a lot. Because by the time they think that I don’t know what’s goin‘ on, I then got the money, and gone.

I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

One of my direct subordinates, one of my guys that worked for me, he would call me up or pull me aside with some major problem, some issue that was going on. And he’d say, ‚Boss, we’ve got this, and that, and the other thing.‘ And I’d look at him and I’d say, ‚Good.‘

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

To have a comeback, you have to have a setback.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

When I was younger, I felt pressure to become someone else once I became successful.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.