Taxes are the sinews of the state.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

wash off the journey

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

I like necklaces that are short, the way skateboarders used to wear them in the seventies.

A real fox calls sour not only those grapes that he cannot reach but also those that he has reached and taken away from others.

The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

It is important to be chic.

My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.