My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

America is just downright mean.

All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.

The 21st century is going to be the American century. Because we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That is the history of the journey of America.

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

So long as our Corps fields such Marines, America has nothing to fear from tyrants, be they Fascists, Communists or Tyrants with Medieval Ideology. For we serve in a Corps with no institutional confusion about our purpose: To fight! To fight well!

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

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

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

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.

America means far more than a continent bounded by two oceans. It is more than pride of military power, glory in war, or in victory. It means more than vast expanse of farms, of great factories or mines, magnificent cities, or millions of automobiles and radios.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Dissents speak to a future age.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.

We live in a bewildering world.

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

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

I came to America to teach my method – not to enter a research experiment.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

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.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

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.

I’m constantly thinking.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

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.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.