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

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as ‚failed states.‘

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.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

I sleep people. I put people unconscious. I’m stating facts.

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.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

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

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

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

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

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

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

Dissents speak to a future age.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

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

It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

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

If you judge, investigate.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

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

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

History should be written as philosophy.

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

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

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.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren’t the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

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

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.