Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are.

To understand is to perceive patterns.

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

The dreamy days and sticky nights of summer were already calling, as if anything could happen.

I always wanted to see people's lives transformed from depression and anxiety to joy and peace.

And I've always said, 'If two people think the same thing about everything, one of them isn't necessary.' We need to be able to understand that if we're going to make real progress.

I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability.

If I was hearing something I couldn't do, I would figure out how to do it.

It was as simple as that - they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be beautiful, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple. ("For The Rest Of Her Life")

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan - spoiled.

Harvard was an extraordinary window on the world.

I love literature, the English language and storytelling. I also have thirty horses and seventy foxhounds to feed.