This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

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

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort, we ought to be happy in our brother’s happiness.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime. I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Ethics and power are separate.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

I think it’s horrible that people have to be told. Don’t smoke! Everybody knows it’s bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Don’t throw stones at your neighbors if your own windows are glass.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

I’m sick of giving creeps money off my soul.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

The dinosaurs aren’t remembered for much more than their bones. When humanity’s gone, what do we give to this little planet that we’re on, and what could we do collectively, removing the pride?

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

You can’t reverse fame. You can lose all the money, but you’ll never lose people knowing you.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

I am such a political person.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.