A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.

Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive.

Friends are God's apology for relations.

Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.

It is difficult to love mankind unless one has a reasonable private income, and when one has a reasonable private income one has better things to do than loving mankind.

The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy.

Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross.

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues.

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

Bacon's not the only thing that's cured by hanging from a string.

Adventure lies not in the places we seek, but in the moments we create in the places we treasure.

... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.

Republicans always try to paint Democrats as weak on defense. This time, they can't. After all, Mitt Romney's idea of an overseas accomplishment is sending U.S. jobs there.

I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.

It is time for us to come together as one united people.

I've always considered the French-speaking part of Switzerland as a province of France.

We have this rising nation China. And one of the things we want to do is make sure that China's neighbors are actually bound to us, bound to the United States.

We do not posses God. We find him periodically.

Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.