Smooth functioning of social life has always depended on the recognition of certain basic limits to behavior. We cannot simply say or do anything we wish, or offend people, without paying consequences – isolation, ostracism, etc.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

My wife told me if there is any rumors about me, it better be about politics and not about my social life.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

I didn’t always have 14,000 people wanting to hang out with me on a Saturday night.

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‚if‘ we will fall, but ‚when.‘ There are no exceptions.

I don’t think I could think of a single thing that’s more isolating than being famous.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

He who acts with a constant view to his own advantage will be much murmured against.

You can’t move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

The public doesn’t mind people living together without being married, providing they don’t overdo it.

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Every action has a consequence. It may be good for strengthening. And I have no doubt that lifting a lot of weights can get you stronger. I just don’t know if lifting stronger weights can keep you healthy, or it can keep you doing your job better, especially for a pro athlete.

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

It means, people who are in high and responsible positions, if they go against righteousness, righteousness itself will get transformed into a destroyer.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

I never enjoyed school and I was never that good at school so leaving wasn’t the biggest thing, but the social aspect of school, leaving your friends, you lose contact with them a bit and now I have more friends at the race track than the friends I keep in touch with at school.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

We have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right mayhap our children and our children’s children will go that way; but if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and to His Word.