“A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.”

The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.

We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one’s resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

WWE asked me to be in the Hall of Fame, and I turned it down. You know why? They put Pete Rose in the wrestling Hall of Fame. This guy can’t even get into his own Hall of Fame.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way.

I’ve never been one to look up the ladder. I’ve always looked down the ladder. As long as there’s one guy down there, I’m fine.

If I sit down to write a joke about, whatever, the polluted Gulf of Mexico, it comes out mundane to me.