I'm a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution.

Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.

I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.

Andalways embrace things, people earthsky stars, as I do, freely and withthe appropriate sense of space.

Poor is what people become, not what they are born to be.

A fish might more easily live on the apex of a rock than a man accustomed to crime live a life of virtue. (“The Story of Prince Barkiarokh”)

Reply to wit with gravity, and to gravity with wit.

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

I've seen a lot of 'Show Boats,' but I've never seen the one that thoroughly satisfies me.

A prolonged war in which a nation takes part is bound to impoverish the breed, since the character of the breed depends on the men who are left.

That makes climate change a bigger public health problem than AIDS, than malaria, than pandemic flu.

You've got to go where the work is. My mom got a job somewhere else so I went and lived with her and then I just bounced all over going to school, chasing rainbows and all that.

A population that does not take care of the elderly and of children and the young has no future, because it abuses both its memory and its promise.