Industry need not wish.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

History is more or less bunk.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

I am not a televangelist.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

The point – the power to hurt – of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

Experts often possess more data than judgment.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

History should be written as philosophy.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.