The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

There might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'.

Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you.

If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.

Nothing has more words and performance than rap music.

James Dean taught me not to speed, River Phoenix taught me not to DO speed, and Marlon Brando taught me to slow down on the cheeseburgers.

You are not here to prove worthiness. You are here to extend the creation, creator, creating that you are.

If we get too caught up in the rhetoric of meditation, we will miss the point. The point was to go beyond rhetoric.

There is a bit of me if I'm pushed in one way I might bounce back and go the opposite.

Limitation of armaments in itself is economically and financially important quite apart from security.

The value of getting to your goals lives not in reaching the goal but what the talents/strengths/capabilities the journey reveals to you.