Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

If you calculate 15 minutes a day to shave, that is 5,000 minutes a year spent shaving.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

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

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

Beware the hobby that eats.

I took the vow of celibacy in 1906. I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of making the vow. She had no objection.

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

I want to let you in on a little secret: I don’t always feel like I’m a success. That’s right. There are plenty of times when I feel like I’ve just totally messed up and failed to connect with the people I’m trying to communicate with.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

People respond in accordance to how you relate to them. If you approach them on the basis of violence, that’s how they’ll react. But if you say, ‚We want peace, we want stability,‘ we can then do a lot of things that will contribute towards the progress of our society.

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

On the ‚Star,‘ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Luckily for me, people don’t scream at me that much in my everyday life.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

I make friends faster and easier than journalists.

I write all my sermons.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us. I never looked back there, but she was like, ‚Will you all just shut up!‘ And I just got up and moved three rows in front. She was like, ‚What are you doing?!‘ I was like, ‚You better get up here! I don’t play the fighting games.‘

We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.

I have wasted my hours.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

My friend has a baby. I’m recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it’s always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

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

Women can’t do everything at the same time, we need to understand milestones in our lives comes in segments.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.

There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Whenever I counsel someone who feels called to be an evangelist, I always urge them to guard their time and not feel like they have to do everything.