When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

Traditions are a common part of our lives. They can be good, and not all traditions are wrong, but sometimes they can take the joy out of life.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

Life is our dictionary.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

After a century of trying, we declared that healthcare in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody. After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil. We doubled our production of clean energy. We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‚forever young at heart.‘

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

My aim is to create a happy society with genuine friendship. Friendship between Tibetan and Chinese peoples is very essential.

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.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

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

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.