You have given me a great responsibility: to stay close to you, to be worthy of you and to exemplify what you are.

The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.

What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love...They're the guiding lights of a life.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.

America has no functioning democracy at this moment.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

It is difficult for the common good to prevail against the intense concentration of those who have a special interest, especially if the decisions are made behind locked doors.

Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.

It would have been easier to fight alone with inadequate forces than to have to accept...responsibility for our ally's lack of fighting qualities and dubious loyalty.

The fact that I was a junkie for a long time is only one slice of my own personal pie, which is made up of a lot of different slices.

I don't regard that as a Guardian Angle. I really do think, in a sense, that we are our own Guardian Angles. But we don't listen to ourselves.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

The State always stands for swindling, intrigue, and privilege, and cannot stand for anything else.

When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

Covetousness bursts the sack and spills the grain.

Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.