“No government has ever been, or can ever be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.”

Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.

For truth has such a face and such a mien, as to be loved needs only to be seen.

Pride – Lord of human kind.

Confidence is the feeling we have before knowing all the facts.

Many things impossible to thought have been by need to full perfection brought.

An horrible stillness first invades our ear, And in that silence we the tempest fear.

No king nor nation one moment can retard the appointed hour.

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.

Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue,–I mean good-nature,–are of daily use; they are the bread of mankind and staff of life.

Mighty things from small beginnings grow.

But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.

The thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man.

Trust on and think To-morrow will repay; To-morrow’s falser than the former day; Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest With some new Joys, cuts off what we possest.

Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought, Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught, The wise, for cure, on exercise depend; God never made his work for man to mend.

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today: Be fair or foul or rain or shine, The joys I have possessed in spite of fate are mine. Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.

By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they were bred. The priest continues where the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

It ain’t made for everybody, but I knocked a lot of blocks down.

I didn’t do any of the crimes that the man two blocks over at the White House is responsible for.

Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, “Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!”

We need to block out the outside world; we need to disbelieve anything that would doubt us, because everyone will doubt us if we allow them that space.

When we are in our studios, in our private space.

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

I was here, and I loaded a shotgun on Independence Day, but I didn’t kill anybody.