You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

I sleep people. I put people unconscious. I’m stating facts.

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.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‚whiz kids‘ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

What I think we need to do is pass a bill that says number one, you own your data. Number two, you can license it to Facebook but the licensing has to be knowing, it has to be willful.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

If you judge, investigate.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.