One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

No untroubled day has ever dawned for me.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

I like my fair share of board games.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

I had this child, and it destroyed my family.

Music is part of the life of fashion, too.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, ‚Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.‘

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

About the idea of a clash between cultures, between civilisations, I don’t believe in it. It’s something some political leaders tried to use, and that the media tried and are still trying to sell us, in order to simplify the world and their work.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

There should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

Temptation is just the feeling that you’re the most independent person on planet Earth. That you know everything. That’s something that we all go through as a kid. Now, this lifestyle that I’m in, the same thing exists! But it’s 10 times worse, because everything is at my disposal. When you’re in the limelight, you can get anything you want.

What I like about pop music, and why I’m still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

It just seems there’s better things to do in your life than be on television if it’s not interesting, if it’s not challenging, if it’s not fun. You know? When it stops being those things for me, I’ll stop making television.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

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

To the man who reads ‚Scouting for Boys‘ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.

We’re so immaturely cynical as a culture. We’re not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.

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

Great countries are those that produce great people.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

I take a lot of pride in the work I do, because people pay to see me. They’ve got to get babysitters, park their car, get popcorn and candy. I’ve got to be conscious of that.

Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.

I’m extremely willful to win, and I respond to challenges. Scoring titles and stuff like that… it sounds, well, I don’t care how it sounds – to me, scoring comes easy. It’s not a challenge to me to win the scoring title, because I know I can.

I am often asked if, when I was secretary, I had problems with foreign men. That is not who I had problems with, because I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America. I had more problems with the men in our own government.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

I play a nobody in Japan.

If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

I don’t think I could think of a single thing that’s more isolating than being famous.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.