“He who laughs last didn’t get the joke.”

The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.

I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them.

Old age is a shipwreck.

I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge.

The Jews remain what they have been at all times: an elite people, self-confident and domineering.

I feel not a person but an instrument of destiny.

Men can have friends, statesmen cannot.

It so happens that the world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can be compared, either in scope or in rapidity.

Hearing Mass is the ceremony I most favor during my travels. Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.

Gentlemen, I am ready for the questions to my answers.

It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone.

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one’s country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

No policy is worth anything outside of reality.

Leaders of men are later remembered less for the usefulness of what they have achieved than for the sweep of their endeavors.

For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.

It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

Life is short … so why waste it doing something dumb?

I really can’t complain about actresses who get paid to be dumb. Most of us can’t get paid to be smart.

We have to confront the very scary fact that the president is a moron. He’s really dumb.

Nature gives liberty even to dumb animals.

Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

People assume actresses are afraid to get older; the truth is the roles get a whole lot more compelling once you’re too old to play dumb.