The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

I’ve analyzed the best I can… and I have not found an impeachable offense, and therefore resignation is not an acceptable course.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

The point – the power to hurt – of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

Dissents speak to a future age.

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?