If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

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.

If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

If I had chosen the populist course, it would have been a breach of the trust placed in me by the people.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

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

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

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

For my career, I wouldn’t go racing if I didn’t enjoy it. I still need to have my say, and not just get put with a team and get told to deal with it.

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

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

If you gonna wear the mohawk, you stick with it. You don’t just be dibby-dabbing. You make up your mind.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.

I don’t write policy for my government.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

As is the case with most people in this game, I am driven by financial motives and creative motives; the question I had to answer is which motive I will give priority to?

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

I’m very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn’t choose.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

We should work with the principle that a work that can be done at a lower level should never be escalated to a higher level.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

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

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

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

I have considered voting Conservative because I am so against the Labour party.

Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world, especially in my field.