Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‚What is the scientific status of the claims?‘ ‚What social or ideological needs do they serve?‘

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‚If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?‘ And whenever the answer has been ‚No‘ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

What you are comes to you.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

It’s very hard to live with yourself if you don’t stick with your moral code.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Never take anything for granted.

Travel teaches toleration.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Let the path be open to talent.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

I don’t really get nervous that much, or if I do, only I know. It’s all inside me. I am good at hiding everything.

Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.