There is no opinion so stupid that it can't be expressed by some philosopher.

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.

Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.

If you feel the need to laugh at people's weaknesses, laugh at yours first.

I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.

You just have to keep going to find that thing that lets you in the door. Sometimes in life when that day comes and you're given the key, you throw it away.

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed. And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.

A black belt doesn't mean anything. The meaning is in the journey.

If a preacher is not first preaching to himself, better that he falls on the steps of the pulpit and breaks his neck than preaches that sermon.

I don't like to be feared, and I can't work in conflict, I'm very bad with conflict. I try to avoid it, it paralyzes me.

Such as the chain of causes we call Fate, such is the chain of wishes: one links on to another; the whole man is bound in the chain of wishing for ever.