If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Love is being stupid together.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

I can’t comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.

The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.

Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.

When I was at the interview asked how I cope with life's difficulties, I said that saving sense of humor. I'm not lying.

I am Left Wing. I am a Humanist.

Although military, economic and political strength certainly favors the more powerful side, the matter of simple justice is a counterbalancing factor.

Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Some people say that music isn't something you are; it's something you do. It's having a constant desire to share and express. But I believe it's something you are. To me it's more inward.

The purpose of art is delectation.