Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

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.

Every country has the government it deserves.

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.

Being rich or famous is the only profound thing that some people have ever said.

Not only in personal relationships, but also in professional life, if like minded people work together, it is a beauty to witness

In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader and would no more read a book alone if they could help it than have a baby alone.

I'm an immigrant myself. I'd probably support it, but I can't do much.

When you plan a journey from your mind into mine, remember to allow for the time difference.

The wise teacher knows that 55 minutes of work plus 5 minutes laughter are worth twice as much as 60 minutes of unvaried work.

To have a certain new eight-and-a-hal f-minute-old light from the sun-to feel it physically, almost as we taste things-this is where you can work with light like that.

When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington.

I was a slave to something he believed to be silly and superstitious: the idea that all life was worth defending and that nothing justified surrender to the forces of destruction.