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.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

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

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Money can’t buy life.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

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

I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

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

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

Life is a song to me.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It’s just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

You are twice as likely to be struck by lightning as you around to be affected by a terrorist event in the United States.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

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.