No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Violent means will give violent freedom. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.

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

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

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

Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

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.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.