People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

Rather be dead than cool.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there’s nothing really to talk about.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

The more you know the less you need to say.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

It is better to be deceived by one’s friends than to deceive them.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

What you guys want, I’m for.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Journalism largely consists of saying ‚Lord Jones is Dead‘ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

In the same way the sun never grows weary of shining, nor a stream of flowing, it is God’s nature to keep His promises. Therefore, go immediately to His throne and say, ‚Do as You promised.‘

All you have in business is your reputation – so it’s very important that you keep your word.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

True friends stab you in the front.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

I don’t like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.

It’s hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don’t always know who to call. So I am very close to my family.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That’s an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can’t cheat real connection. It’s built up slowly. It’s about trust and time.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

Trust should be the basis for all our moral training.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

You’re not going to scare me into being somebody I don’t want to be.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Friends accept you the way you are.

War is what happens when language fails.

When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.

Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.