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.

War settles nothing.

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.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

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.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

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.

A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.

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

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

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.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

I always felt an outsider.

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.

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

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Many people, especially young people, would like to be more independent and on their own. But it is very difficult and they suffer from feelings of isolation. I think that is one reason why young readers support my work.

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

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

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

By that sin fell the angels.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

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.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

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.

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.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

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

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

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

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

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 public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Consequences are unpitying.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

It’s what counts, isn’t it, on the Sunday, rather than pre-season testing. If you lock up, you do a little mistake, it’s nothing, but if you do it on Sunday, you lose a place or you have to box for a flat spot or something like that. It’s a much bigger problem.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

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

Men don’t really like skinny, do they?

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.