Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something.

We are so presumptuous that we think we can separate our personal interest from that of humanity, and slander mankind without compromising ourselves.

The shortness of life cannot dissuade us from its pleasures, nor console us for its pains.

The young suffer less from their own errors than from the cautiousness of the old.

You are not born for fame if you don't know the value of time.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

Action makes more fortune than caution.

Courage is adversity's lamp.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

Demagoguery beats data in making public policy.

What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.

The proper response, as Hanukkah teaches, is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle.

Should we really let our people starve so we can pay our debts.

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

A hypocrite [is the one who] wants to impress others with an external facade of religious piety that he knows is devoid of internal spiritual substance.

I think that if people are having trouble communicating with one another, the least they can do is SHUT UP.

How long a book tends to illustrate depends on the book. The Awful Aunty took me 10 days.