There are many people in the world who really don’t understand-or say they don’t-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

Those who have a true understanding of America know that we have no desire for territorial expansion, for economic or other domination of other peoples. Such purposes are repugnant to our ideals of human freedom.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

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

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

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.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

‚Thank you‘ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

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

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

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!

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

If I decide to make a coat red in the show, it’s not just red, I think: is it communist red? Is it cherry cordial? Is it ruby red? Or is it apple red? Or the big red balloon red?

The Russians feared Ike. They didn’t fear me.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.