What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.

I have the courage to be mistaken.

All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam.

To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.

Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed.

Hail fellow well meet on the highway to madness. Madness is a small town very far away. Most of us, at some point, find we probably could walk there. Others have a road cave in and dump them there.

An idea upon which attention is peculiarly concentrated is an idea which tends to realize itself.

Pride indemnifies itself and loses nothing even when it casts away vanity.

No one who has had "Taps" played for them has ever been able to hear it.

In trouble waters I had to learn how to float

Death is a part of life ... and that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does.

What matters in a character is not whether one holds this or that opinion: what matters is how proudly one upholds it.

But I would like to think that it's the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.

...I am much better now at ambiguities.

At the request of my Japanese colleagues, in 2000 we revisited the possibility of signing a peace treaty based on the 1956 agreement.