No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

A friend is nothing but a known enemy.

What ‚multiculturalism‘ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

I’ll be judged on the body of work and not the popularity of any one decision.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn’t an MP3.

In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person’s life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader’s style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

The U.S. military is not war weary. Our military draws strength from confronting our enemies when clear policy objectives are set and we are fully resourced for the fight.

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

The Paralympic Games is about transforming our perception of the world.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

I don’t feel I’ve had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

The intention and outcome of vulnerability is trust, intimacy and connection. The outcome of oversharing is distrust, disconnection – and usually a little judgment.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

I think the perception of peace is what distracts most people from really having it.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

They’re right to think that about me, because I’m the person most likely to sleep with my female fans, I genuinely love other women. And I think they know that.

There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.