“I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me…I don’t know which makes me feel worse.”

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

Speech is civilization itself.

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Everything is politics.

In 1985, I was arrested, along with my mother and brother, Martin III, in a protest against apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.

In 1985, I joined my mother in a protest against apartheid in which we were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. And she was at President-elect Mandela’s side in Johannesburg when he claimed victory in South Africa’s first free elections.

Jacob’s little smirk became a full-blown grin, and I knew he was picturing Charlie showing up to arrest him. This grin was too bitter, too full of mocking to satisfy me. This wasn’t the smile I’d been waiting to see.

The word ‘arrested,’ this is semantics. This was all arranged in advance. I was voluntarily processed.

People must understand that people were beaten, arrested, jailed, and some people were murdered, while attempting to register to vote, or to get others to register to vote.

I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home.