It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

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

I think the first duty of society is justice.

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

We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.

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.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

The mainstream is always under attack.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

The example that America knows how to govern itself is one of the compelling aspects of our national security.

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

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

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.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

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

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society.

The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

I believe in benevolent dictatorship provided I am the dictator.

Even if the politics needed doesn’t exist today, we still need to use our voices to make sure that the people in power are focused on the right things. Because this is a democracy, and in a democracy, people are the ones who run the country.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

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

There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

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 basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

Babylon is everywhere. You have wrong and you have right. Wrong is what we call Babylon, wrong things. That is what Babylon is to me. I could have born in England, I could have born in America, it make no difference where me born, because there is Babylon everywhere.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

I think governments can’t do much.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

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.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.