Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

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

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Respect is one of life’s greatest treasures. I mean, what does it all add up to if you don’t have that?

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

What is my life if I am no longer useful to others.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

Empire and liberty.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.