Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I think the word rich is all relative.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

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.

There’s no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television’s much better than movies.

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds.

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It’s like stealing a two-year-old.

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Some day, following the example of the United States of America, there will be a United States of Europe.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

The brain is wider than the sky.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

If you’ve spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

As a British driver, you get compared to Lewis and I get that. But when he came to McLaren, they were doing well and had a championship-winning car. I’m in a very different situation so I don’t compare myself to his stats.

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

I never admire another’s fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

Madonna and I are very different. Just saying. We’re very different. I wouldn’t make that comparison at all, and I don’t mean to disrespect Madonna: she’s a nice lady, and she’s had a fantastic, huge career – biggest pop star of all time.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody’s afraid of French fries.

There is no gambling like politics.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Particularly Instagram, people look like they have a much better life than they really do. People basically seem like they are way better-looking than they really are, and they are way happier-seeming than they really are.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

We believe that according the name ‚investors‘ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‚romantic.‘

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.