Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

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.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Keep in mind that no matter how perfectly you get your life in order, you will never be rid of all your problems. Problems are a way of life, always have been, always will be. But how you elect to view those problems is all up to you.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

If you desire many things, many things will seem few.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn’t believe that, about other possibilities?

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

History is written by the victors.

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

Information is not knowledge.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.

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

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

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Study men, not historians.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

We can’t have, like, willy-nilly proliferation of fake news. That’s crazy. You can’t have more types of fake news than real news. That’s allowing public deception to go unchecked. That’s crazy.