There are two kinds of speeches: the Mother Hubbard speech, which, like the garment, covers everything but touches nothing, and the French bathing suit speech, which covers only the essential points.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all the time. But Republicans haven't given up trying.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he's going to get sick on it.

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.

Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

Just like the Alamo, somebody damn well needed to go to their aid. Well, by God, I'm going to Viet Nam's aid!

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

I think that ordinary people who are placed in extraordinary circumstances find themselves pushed beyond their limits, and learn new truths about themselves.

The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.

A big book is a hard thing to manage - I find the computer makes it easier to keep it in order, and to keep the old drafts (which I sometimes go back to) without drowning in paper.

You gotta win. That's all it takes.

The most accomplished way of using books is to serve them as some people do lords; learn their titles and then brag of their acquaintance.

If I like it, it's gonna be on my album. You can't please everyone.

When I'm onstage, I hope it looks like what I want to see - the lights, the pyro, the band.

Politics isn't just a game of clashing parties and competing interests. The right reason is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.