Every country has the government it deserves.

I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep.

To know how to wait. It is the great secret of success.

In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve.

It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.

What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.

It is not the mediocrity of women's education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother.

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

All beings, including each one of us, enemy and friend alike, exist in patterns of mutuality, interconnectedness, co-responsibility and ultimately in unity.

Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share.

In a normal time, I don't think economic policy makes a large difference one way or another. But in times of crisis it makes all the difference in the world.

I never refused an autograph, never refused to buy someone a drink. Now I'm learning to say I've got other things on, instead of doing it and wondering why.

If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.

Work. Write. Read. Keep putting words on the page, because that's the only way you'll get better.

I like stories of the classic hero, of good versus evil, the ones in which the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black... and I love a good sword fight.