“The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.”

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

Poor people will do almost anything to avoid problems. They see a challenge and they run…the secret to success, my friends, is not to try to avoid or get rid of or shrink from your problems; the secret is to grow yourself so that you are bigger than your problems.

I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I just know for sure I’m going to keep playing basketball.

Morning is when I do all my best work.

If you tell a teammate you’re ready to play as tough as you’re able to, you’d better go out there and do it.

All I do is sit at home and watch Netflix.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat…nor make love for eight hours…

The world doesn’t need more people playing small. It’s time to stop hiding out and start stepping out. It’s time to stop needing and start leading. It’s time to start sharing your gifts instead of hoarding them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s time you started playing the game of life in a “big” way.