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

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

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.

In England, football is a big thing to talk about, but Liverpool, it’s a special place. You feel it when you make your first step.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

I think the word rich is all relative.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

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.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

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

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable.

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

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

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

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

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.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

Every people have gods to suit their circumstances.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Our country does not believe in the concept of your God and my God. We believe that all gods are one. We have different ways of accepting Him. All ways lead to Him.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

Compton got such a legacy in hip-hop.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child.

Building capacity dissolves differences. It irons out inequalities.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them – lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

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

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.