Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.

If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.

Being kind is more important than being right.

I just wish we knew a little less about his urethra and a little more about his arms sales to Iran.

I don't like food that's too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting.

Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated.

People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer. You can kill someone with a baseball bat or a car, but no one is trying to ban you from driving to the ball game.

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.

I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by the superiority of others.

The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth

God does not patch up the old life, or make certain repairs on the old life; He gives a new life, through the new birth.

I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.

It is wisdom to know others. It is enlightenment to know oneself.

Of one thing there is no doubt: if Paris makes demands of the heart, then Munich makes demands of the stomach.

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

Decide promptly, but never give any reasons for your decisions. Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong.