You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.

Everything I do has a moral to it.

I'm what you call a Depression sailor.

It was my mom who told me, "Ernie, if you make even one person happy with your smile or a funny thing you did every day, you'll have accomplished a great deal." And that's all I've ever tried to do.

I don't chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I'd be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.

Writers used to make such wonderful pictures without all that swearing, all that cursing. And now it seems that you can't say three words without cursing. And I don't think that's right.

If John Wayne were alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave!

Every time I step in front of a camera I feel young again. I really do. It keeps your mind active and it keeps you going.

It's not your word that matters, it's who you give it too.

Gary Cooper - the greatest listener in the world! And he used to answer in kind, which is wonderful because you don't see that anymore. People don't listen. They really don't.

The Navy has changed a great deal. Not that the officers of my day were bad, because I served under a lot of good officers, believe me. But there were a few bad ones, too.

The elements of life do not segregate themselves, unless they are human.

Listen, I am in the fighting game, I don't care about anything else.

Evidence of warming is not evidence that the cause is anthropogenic.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

the intermittent breeze carried her scent to me again and again , singing in another language of memories from another form .

The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.

I worked up a daily fury about some economic injustice because there were so many of them.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

Time ... thou ceaseless lackey to eternity.