Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

I’ve enjoyed all the parts of my career.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before – that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

I think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we’ve had.

I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

A master performer like Bill Clinton never lost sight of the fact that as president he had to project confidence and power, but if he was speaking to a group of autoworkers he would adjust his accent and his words to fit the audience, and do the same for a group of executives.

Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

I got my buzz from playing.

I had a good time boxing. I enjoyed it – and I may come back.

The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.

Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.

My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern… No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

Precaution is better than cure.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

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

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

For me, education was power.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

You just do what you can and you have as much fun as possible.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

Actually, to be an effective person politically in this country, I think you have to be thirty or over, and also you have to be rich, well-placed, you have to be close to power. And I don’t think that young people, because they look young, can do much, as I think they are counterproductive.

He who is contented is rich.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.