“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.”

The true antidote to greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether you obtain the object of your desire or not. Either way, you are still content.

Meditating means bringing the mind back to something again and again. Thus, we all meditate, but unless we direct it in some way, we meditate on ourselves and on our own problems, reinforcing our self-clinging.

A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on a Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

Occasionally we sigh for an earlier day when we could just look at the stars without worrying whether they were theirs or ours.

By the time you’re eighty years old you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it.

Experience is something I always think I have until I get more of it.

Journalism, like history, has no therapeutic value; it is better able to diagnose than to cure, and it provides society with a primitive means of psychoanalysis that allows the patient to judge the distance between fantasy and reality.

When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.

Discipline means protection from one’s own wanton interest.

The United States grants the favors of the second, third, or fifty-seventh chance, and its citizens remain free to invent for themselves whatever character draws a crowd or pays the rent.

Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime.

Some idea of inflation comes from seeing a youngster get his first job at a salary you dreamed of as the culmination of your career.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions.

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

As surely as you are a living man, so surely did that spectral anatomy visit my room again last night, grin in my face, and walk away with my trousers: nor was I able to spring from my bed, or break the chain which seemed to bind me to my pillow.

Most of us wait until we’re in trouble, and then we pray like the dickens. Wonder what would happen if, some morning, we’d wake up and say, “Anything I can do for You today, Lord?”

Eighty is when you order a steak and the headwaiter puts it through the blender. Or when you wake up as many times during the night as Burt Reynolds, but not for the same reason.

The help (in Japan) is very polite. They bow so much, you don’t know which end to talk to.

Free speech isn’t dead in Germany and Italy, merely the speakers.

Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually Good. Do you realize that?

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

The Army needs leaders the way a foot needs a big toe.

Well, the way things are going, aside from wheat and auto parts, America’s biggest export is now the Oscar.

And the only people I fear are those who never have doubts… Save us all from arrogant men, and all the causes they’re for.