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

I must be cruel, only to be kind.

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

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.

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

Go, and never darken my towels again.

Nothing can come of nothing.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

Dissents speak to a future age.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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. Today you are looking at the Taliban or ISIS; tomorrow you might be looking at another name.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

I am not a televangelist.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

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

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

I’m the first to admit this whole salary thing is getting out of control. In the final analysis, it’s still about the work.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

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

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

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

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

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‚If wet, in the library.‘ Who could say that this is bad?

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

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

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

I’m so tough and so bad, I can be humble and lift another guy up.

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

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.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

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