It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

The term ‚globalisation‘ is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.

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

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Too many people treat parenting like it’s the 20th item on their to-do list.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

I’m a mama’s boy because everything I do is with respect to my mother. I won’t do a movie or a video that would bring disrespect to my mother.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

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.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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

Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

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.

I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values – and follow my own moral compass – then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‚Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

Occasionally the conflict between ‚what we stand for‘ and ‚what we do‘ has been forthrightly addressed.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

I’m not a reality-TV kind of guy. But it’s almost like we’re living in a reality show. Every day in this country, everybody keeps worrying about the deterioration of America, and it’s like a big reality show.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Family home evening is more for the purpose of teaching values and gospel principles, displaying talents and enjoying different kinds of family fun and activities.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn’t even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.

Oil has become the principal wealth in the hands of the great Yankee transnationals; through this energy source, they had an instrument that considerably expanded their political power in the world.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected.

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

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Everything I do, I hope, is that I represent something, and I represent the right things to my children and give them the right sense of what they’re capable of and the world as it should be seen.

As a young kid, I really wanted to be rich.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.