Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

One day it will be over, and I don’t care.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Everything isn’t political.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

The brain is wider than the sky.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

I’m not somebody that thinks about destiny and fate, but I don’t walk away from it when something unfolds.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Time stays, we go.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

I have wondered about time all my life.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.