It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

The American people have not become heartless.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

No one can say, ‚I have dropped out – I am no longer in the system.‘ When you’re in prison, you’re even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don’t transform the system as an absolute thing.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

The mob is the mother of tyrants.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

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.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‚solution‘ to society’s ‚problems.‘

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

One reason I don’t want to play in England again is because we don’t have any personalities.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‚If wet, in the library.‘ Who could say that this is bad?

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers – organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative – if we don’t solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

I’ve always hated the danger part of climbing, and it’s great to come down again because it’s safe.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

You’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

I would just like to say something, ladies and gentlemen. Something that I think is very important. It is that, you, we – we own this country. We – we own it. It is not you owning it, and not politicians owning it. Politicians are employees of ours.

Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

It’s going to be a season with lots of accidents, and I’ll risk saying that we’ll be lucky if something really serious doesn’t happen.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

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

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing. Today you are looking at the Taliban or ISIS; tomorrow you might be looking at another name.

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

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

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

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.

We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we love, or that we will not be safe. Often, our biggest fear is the knowledge that one day our bodies will cease functioning. So even when we are surrounded by all the conditions for happiness, our joy is not complete.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.