It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

I think we’ve taken the meaning of Christmas out. People don’t stop and think about Jesus or the birth of Jesus. When they think of Christmas, they think of Santa Claus and – for the children, and they think of giving gifts and out-giving the next person of spending their time looking for the right thing for somebody who has everything.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Sometimes I just sit still and enjoy God’s presence.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Littera scripta manet – ‚The written word will remain‘. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me.

The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.

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.

Day by day we should weigh what we have granted to the spirit of the world against what we have denied to the spirit of Jesus, in thought and especially in deed.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

There’s no present. There’s only the immediate future and the recent past.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Looking back on the production of ‚Nevermind,‘ I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

I have wondered about time all my life.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn’t make your house look any better.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

In every parting there is an image of death.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.