We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

In our seeking for economic and political progress, we all go up – or else we all go down.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

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

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?

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.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

I think that people are tired. They’re tired of the same old kind of politics. People want a new tone to politics.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.

The mob is the mother of tyrants.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

The American people have not become heartless.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

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

Wherever there is a settled society, religion is necessary; the laws cover manifest crimes, and religion covers secret crimes.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Our intention creates our reality.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.