“People will tell you anything but what they do is always the truth.”

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.

Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. Moses in effect led the tribes of Israel out of the District of Columbia, parted Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, and wandered for forty years in Delaware.

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I’ve been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace.

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines.

Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.

We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.

A lot of people understand what not saying anything means, so, in effect, not saying anything is really saying a lot.

I always saw myself as an old man living in the mountains playing a guitar, but I didn’t really turn that into a desire to be a professional musician or a singer or a rock star or anything like that.

If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.

Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.

To do something that you feel in your heart that’s great, you need to make a lot of mistakes. Anything that’s successful is a series of mistakes.

I don’t have anything to prove.

I want to like my music before you like it. I don’t want to sell anything that I don’t really like.

I hate to say anything that may hurt UCLA, but I can’t be quiet when I see what the NCAA is doing to Jerry Tarkanian only because he has a reputation for giving a second chance to many black athletes other coaches have branded as troublemakers.