One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

I can tell you character traits I admire and work to develop in myself - perseverance, self-discipline, courage to stand up for what is right even when it is against one's friends or one's self.

Dealing with Hollywood and commercial entertainment, you always have to worry that the political message is going to be skewed or obscured.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Well, I realized finally that all of the hard work paid off.

Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated - economically or politically - by a powerful few.

If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.

Your book may be a masterpiece but do not suggest that to the publisher because many of the most hopeless manuscripts that have come his way have probably been so described by their authors.

If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.