It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Every loss of life is terrible.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

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.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

People who think too much before they act don’t act too much.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

I don’t join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn’t have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven – that’s none of my business, ultimately. I won’t lecture her on the philosophy of science.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Never find fault with the absent.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

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

The effects of climate change are real and must be acted on.

To learn something but not to do is really not to learn. To know something but not to do is really not to know.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

I think it is a sin to look at another person as inferior to yourself because of race or because of ethnic background, and I think the greatest thing to do is to pray that God will give you love for them, and I do.

Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Justice is truth in action.