“Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.”

There is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity.

Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one’s vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

Most civilized lives are measured out with coffee spoons.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other’s words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way that we are going.

Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues. . . .

It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. Its overuse is its greatest danger, and the writer who can’t resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking.

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labor leader interested in the labor movement.

Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

So we can feel grateful for what we have been given. Sadness soon disappears and, in return, we get inspired to bless others.

New York has given me a lot, but I still don’t consider it home.

You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.

The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me – my mother’s side of the family have awful legs.

The best advice anybody could have given me was to keep getting up over and over again.

To see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.

I also have to speak out for people around me who are afraid, who think it is not worth it or who have totally given up hope. So I want to set an example: you can do it and this is OK, to speak out.

Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.