People love conspiracy theories.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

I purposely don’t talk about money, because people are already skeptical about TV preachers. But I do say that I want you to be blessed. To me, prosperity is having health, having great children, having peace, good relationships. It’s not about the money.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the People.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.

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

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

I repeat… that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.

I like learning more about people; I like to talk to people.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

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.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

We are a forward-looking people, and we must have a forward-looking government.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

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

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

People do not make wars; governments do.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

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

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

I am for people. I can’t help it.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

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