Understanding arises through making

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.

One truly understands only what one can create.

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.

People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.

Governments must be conformable to the nature of the governed; governments are even a result of that nature.

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.

Political Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it's never taking your car out of the garage. It's safe in there, but you'll never go anywhere.

Great spirits often meet violent oppisition with mediocre minds.

I don't vote party lines. Never have. I vote for the best candidate.

We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much: a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows and, but which all the world does not practice

Somehow reading a book never feels like sitting still.

I think we're all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there's nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild.

People don't understand what term "selling out" means. To me selling out means if I were to stop doing this and go work for McDonald's then I would sell out.

I smoked some pot as a kid, but I just never did drugs.

There is a southern proverb - fine words butter no parsnips.