The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

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.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

There can never be any stop to learn about different cultures by travelling to different places. And whatever comes your way, continue the healthy eating habits.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: ‚If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?‘

Part of your heritage in this society is the opportunity to become financially independent.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

In a higher phase of communist society… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

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.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

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

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.

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

I have really been disillusioned with soccer in England.

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

Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

Being a Puerto Rican artist, I support all kinds of projects that are developed on my beautiful island that in some way or another put our Puerto Rican flag up.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

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

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

Coffee is a language in itself.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

The world has entered an era of the most profound and challenging change in human history.

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.