I'm a massive pessimist.

Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

I had been a radical, a left-wing politico, and meeting the Indian people made me realize that the politics of the left and the right were so much less important than the politics of the heart and the...

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

Everybody has flaws, and every country has flaws. But you can still love something even though you know it's been so wrong before, and sometimes is now, and probably will be again.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.

The big problem of our modern society is that we feel that we are separated from the nature. But it's just the opposite. We are interrelated and our DNA is the same. And only when human beings...

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether...

There are three constants in life... change, choice and principles.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Cleanliness is the scourge of art.

In your imagination, you can perfect things in a way you can't do in your everyday life.

Justice is to be found only in imagination.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything...

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.