Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.

Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

God's friendship is with people who know their poverty.

Every gift of a new day is an opportunity to discover a happier you.

The spectacle has changed but our eyes remain the same.

I didn't grow up wealthy. We couldn't even afford spaghetti sauce when I was first born, but my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.

The [Sarah ]Palin endorsement as sort of vouching for Donald Trump is all about. She is the sort of tribune of not conservatism as ideology.

I am not particularly interested in saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.

The first time I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov it was like he had an anti-gravity machine in his pants. He would jump and stay in the air for 10 minutes.

Sometimes everyone does the right thing and there's still a mess left to clean up. Someone has to take responsibility for it.

The future of peace and prosperity that we seek for all the world's peoples needs a foundation of tolerance, security, equality and justice.

I can't think of a greater legacy than, "Because you lived, another species survived."