An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism and spends his energies upon that.

I don't believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue ... It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

Drawn by conceit from reason's plan How vain is that poor creature man; How pleas'd in ev'ry paltry elf To grate about that thing himself.

Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

Perfect people are the scariest people to me.

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

People naturally despise a dependant.

Strike fast, strike hard, strike often.