In my neighborhood, when you’ve got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.

Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth. You must give some time to your fellow man. For remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too.

I don’t say very much I don’t really think through. I know that sounds inconsistent with Joe Biden.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

I have a family, loving aunts, and a good home. No, on the surface I seem to have everything except my one true friend. All I think about when I’m with friends is having a good time. I can’t bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don’t seem to be able to get any closer, and that’s the problem.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

I know why we’re strong. I know why we have held together; I know why we are united: it’s because there’s always been a growing middle class.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

I think one of the basic reasons men make good friends is that they can make up their minds quickly.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

Put it this way: If I asked, ‚How’s business?‘ and you say, ‚Boomin‘ or ‚Amazing,‘ I already know the answer.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

If you can talk, you can write.

Please think of me like an endangered species and just observe me quietly from far away. If you try to talk to me or touch me casually, I may get intimidated and bite you. So please be careful.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood – rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky – they all turn out in one day.

My doorman is more important to me than any head of any company. He keeps us safe.

I’m a people’s man – only the people matter.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Engineering didn’t take to me. And what saved me and kept me in college was I ran into ROTC cadets who were in a fraternity called The Pershing Rifles. And I found my place. I found discipline. I found structure. I found people that were like me and I liked.

The American public’s a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I’m going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I’m going to do it.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.