Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

We love our planet Earth. We should - it is our home, and there's no place like home. There can't ever be a better place than Earth.

I just want to help people do better research.

Look for a way to lift someone up. If that's all you do, it's enough.

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.

What is American strategy first of all? So American strategy is to command the seas, right? The foundation of our power is sea control. Nobody can invade us, but we can invade them.

Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.

A friend of mine said Winn-Dixie is the way that people want the world to be and Tiger Rising is the way that it is.

Let's clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.

I've played lots of villains in my time and I think the reason they've been so successful is that they're not two-dimensional. They're not black and white. That's the gig.

You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.