“Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.”

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

I broke in with four hits, and the writers promptly declared they had seen the new Ty Cobb. I

Only 4 percent of all the companies owned in Scotland have their head offices in Scotland.

I predicted in 1950 that in five years, manufacturers the world over would be screaming for protection. It took only four years.

I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‘One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.’ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

I need to play three or four weeks to get into a rhythm.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

I was baptized by my father when I was 4 years old.