To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Inventors make something out of anything, but God makes something out of nothing. Elohim needs no raw materials.

He who doesn't fear his own imagination...is not worthy to envision.

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

Happiness that depends mainly on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it's there, the next day it may not be.

My political career goes back to the '60s and those were times of vigorous debates.

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.

Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.

To charge Snowden with espionage is a severe form of political persecution.

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons.

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.