We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

What we live by we die by.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it’s going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we’ve made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That’s why we did it.

The status quo sucks.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn’t do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress.

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.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

If you want small changes in your life, work on your attitude. But if you want big and primary changes, work on your paradigm.

India should walk on her own shadow – we must have our own development model.

Success is steady progress toward one’s personal goals.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

I always say that people should not rush to change religions. There is real value in finding the spiritual resources you need in your home religion.

Shall I, that have destroyed my Preservers, return home?

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Without deviation progress is not possible.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.

Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment.

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‚Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

I’m not looking to freak people out – eating rodents or bugs. I don’t do that anymore.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

For me, when you are have people wondering what is next, what is coming out, you are on the right track.

Anytime we step out boldly to make changes, we take a chance that we might fail. But the only way to get better is to try.

Power does not change you, it unmasks you.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

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.

Start wide, expand further, and never look back.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

When I cut my hair, the whole sound changed, my style changed.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.