The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

I just don’t like mutual funds. I think they’re a rip-off.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

You pity the fool because you don’t want to beat up a fool! You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won’t have to beat him up. So that’s why I say fools, you gotta give another chance because they don’t know no better. That’s why I pity them!

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

It’s not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.

I get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.

The answer to many of the domestic problems we face is not higher taxes and more spending. It is less waste, more results and greater freedom for the individual American to earn a rightful place in his own community – and for States and localities to address their own needs in their own ways, in the light of their own priorities.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

This 90/10 rule holds true in almost anything financial. Take the game of golf, for example. Ten percent of the professional golfers make 90 percent of the money.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don’t mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that’s a good discussion. Maybe that’s the way to help close the deficit.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

The IRS! They’re like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

We’ve all heard stories of lottery winners, rock stars, heirs and heiresses, and professional athletes becoming millionaire morons who wake up rich but are broke by nightfall.

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

I find the difference, for me, between having no money and having quite a bit is that the bills get bigger. And that’s it. The lifestyle doesn’t change.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

I don’t go down the road of condemning.

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

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

When President Obama speaks about raising taxes on the rich, he speaks about high-income employees and small business owners, not entrepreneurs who build big businesses.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn’t willing to.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

If you would judge, understand.

A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback.

Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.