I’m reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States – for the century, at least.

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

I always have an optimistic view, no matter what it is.

When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes… to an extent, that’s true elsewhere, including the United States, but it’s been pretty extreme in Greece.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn’t work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

I dwell in possibility.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Say ‚Toronto‘ or ‚Ontario,‘ and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.

The Middle East is hopeful. There’s hope there.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

I hope my own children never have to fight a war.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

In all my work, I try to say – ‚You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?‘

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time. And a living faith will last in the midst of the blackest storm.

As strong as the United States is, we can’t deal with terrorism alone.

I do hope that some of my dissents will one day be the law.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

It is our future on the line, and we must at least have a say in it.

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

‚You are no saint,‘ says the devil. Well, if I am not, I am a sinner, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Sink or swim, I go to Him; other hope, I have none.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.

The United States supports a strong, united Ukraine with productive and peaceful relationships with both the East and the West, with both Russia and Europe.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification.

In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Hate crime is not new in the United States.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future!

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed… Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States.

It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

On every front there are clear answers out there that can make this country stronger, but we’re going to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling. Our job is to make sure that even as we make progress, that we are also giving people a sense of hope and vision for the future.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

In order to deal with all the medical cost demands and other challenges in the U.S., as we look to raise that revenue, the rich will have to pay slightly more. That’s quite clear.