“It’s hard work making movies. It’s like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it’s emotional, tense work. If you don’t really love it, then it ain’t worth it.”

Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood.

You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you’re going to need help, and you never know who you’re going to need it from.

All democracies turn into dictatorships – but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.

Success is when you try to achieve your inward vision externally and have it come off the way you see it. Then YOU feel successful about it; that’s how success is measured.

Train yourself to let go of the things you fear to lose.

I’ve discovered that most critics themselves are cinematically illiterate. They don’t really know much about movies. They don’t know the history. They don’t know the technology. They don’t know anything. So for them to try to analyze it, they’re lost.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

It’s not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It’s how well can you make it under the circumstance, because there’s always circumstances. You cannot use that as an excuse.

Someday you’re going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.

The one way the world hasn’t changed: teaching is still the most important job.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

Education is the single most important job of the human race.

The older you get, the less seriously you take criticism. I’ve gotten to a point now where I ignore it completely. It’s just not relevant to me anymore.

From kindergarten to college, certain teachers engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. While I was not the best student, their efforts left a lasting impact.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

I’m strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.

Jesus needs neither books nor Doctors of Divinity in order to instruct souls; He, the Doctor of Doctors, He teaches without noise of words.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

Man is not made for space. But with the help of biologists and medical doctors, he can be prepared and accommodated.

My doctor told me I shouldn’t work out until I’m in better shape. I told him, ‘All right; don’t send me a bill until I pay you.’