The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

If you’ve spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

Well begun is half done.

We may never be strong enough to be entirely nonviolent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep nonviolence as our goal and make strong progress towards it.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

There has to be a global mission of human progress.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There’s a lot of places left to go.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

Now we’re in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change – we’re doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change – inch by inch, day by day.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

One thing I’ve tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Empire and liberty.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

With Kansas, I had a four-year deal. The initial two months were real tough. I had to adjust a lot. Then, things started looking up.

Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can’t breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.