Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

I never dreamt, in my dream, I’m Dalai Lama.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

The overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

If you are a small company taking on a big company, you need to have a sense of humor.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a ‚Keep Out‘ sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

If you’re working for a good company and you’re happy there, and you’re being compensated accordingly, and your work satisfies you, you should stay there.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

You can’t trust very many people.