In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

The nice thing is that when people come up to me, it’s the football they remember, not all the other rubbish.

Perhaps one day I will go into space.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother… We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

Taxpayers have long memories, especially when it comes to how their hard-earned money is spent.

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

I never thought a career as a musician was possible.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I’m very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.

The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable.

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

Do all you can to make your dreams come true.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

The sinews of war are infinite money.

I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.

If a small-town boy like me who bagged groceries was able to make his dreams come true, you can too.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.

I have dual citizenship; it just so happens I live in America. I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood, and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

I always make my dreams into goals.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

I never dreamed of being a pop star when I was a child.

Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes… can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.