“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.”

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

I think at this point, there’s a certain bizarre chemistry between Jamie [Hyneman] and I that we can’t ignore a lot of the mechanics of, that we’re quite aware of.

The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.

we’re finding that all these things can lead to people believing the world works in a certain way. I

I watched a lot of the James Bond movies, certainly, both the old ones and the reboot with Daniel Craig. I watched a lot of the Matt Helm films with Dean Martin, which just have these great car scenes where it’s rear-projected, and they just start making martinis out of a bar in the glove compartment.

A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all.

Pantagruelism is a certain gaitey of the spirit consisting in a disdain for the hazards of fortune.

Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

Whether we kept a certain number of troops there or pulled out completely