Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

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

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

I’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

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.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, ‚Wow, these networks have a lot of information.‘

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

When I got depressed, I watched Bruce Lee movies. I learned everything from Bruce Lee.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.