It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Love is being stupid together.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

If you don't understand it, it's art.

[But] I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is in debit - we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil.

God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness it has no taste.

[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

If it's a man's game so decidedly that a woman would be soiled by entering it, then there is something radically wrong with the American game of politics.

He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity, and her servility will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.

Any soldier returning home must rediscover his humanity and establish a livable peace with the discovered, liberated, permanently dark places in his own heart -- the darkness that is always with us.

The United States needs to be made more appealing to legal immigrants.

I can't believe that OMON [Russia's riot police] would hit a girl. I simply can't imagine it.