Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

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

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

No one but a fool is always right.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

I live in a crazy time.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

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.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

The world remains ever the same.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.