In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

In our seeking for economic and political progress, we all go up – or else we all go down.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

Those who have a true understanding of America know that we have no desire for territorial expansion, for economic or other domination of other peoples. Such purposes are repugnant to our ideals of human freedom.

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad: that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength; our sense of purpose and not our ability to achieve a better America.

America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

I came here in 1974 to do a play, and then I went to L.A. I really like living in America. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

We welcome the scrutiny of the world – because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect.

No matter the nationality, no matter the religion, no matter the ethnic background, America brings out the best in people.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

As soon as I accomplish one goal, I replace it with another one. I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I just say to myself, ‚All right, well, I’d like to headline a tour,‘ and then when I get there, we’ll see what my next goal is.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

I have seen how leaders rule by intimidation. Leaders who demonize and dehumanize entire groups of people often do so because they have nothing else to offer. And I have seen how places that stifle the voices and dismiss the potential of their citizens are diminished: how they are less vital, less hopeful, less free.

This President is going to lead us out of this recovery.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

You practice mindfulness, on the one hand, to be calm and peaceful. On the other hand, as you practice mindfulness and live a life of peace, you inspire hope for a future of peace.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without my ever seeking it.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

I tend not to look back and dwell on a project once it is finished.

America is a Nation with a mission – and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace – a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror – and America is honored to be their friend.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‚You’re better than the Cassius of old.‘

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

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.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.