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.

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

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

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.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

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 depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

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.

The virtues, like the Muses, are always seen in groups. A good principle was never found solitary in any breast.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

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

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

Applause is a receipt, not a bill.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Every wall is a door.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

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.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Remember you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

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

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

The dropping of bombs on people – isn’t that terrorism?

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.