“Between friends there is no bribery. The relationship of friends is intrinsically fair and equal. Neither feels stronger or more clever or more beautiful than the other.”

There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

Don’t depend on governments or corporations to fix problems. Social revolutions are led by passionate individuals and that’s what makes the difference.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary. to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

You can never have a relationship with someone whose smell you don’t like.

We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.

Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.

Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.

An education not founded on Art will never succeed.

The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.

To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

You’ve got to realize that when all goes well, and everything is beautiful, you have no comedy. It’s when somebody steps on the bride’s train, or belches during the ceremony that you’ve got comedy!

I tell everyone very plainly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Why, greyhound puppies. That’s a totally different matter.

They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless efficiency of organization.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

Dealing with the government does not mean you have to give a bribe.

To bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn … seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime.

[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

By reason of gifts and bribes the offices be given to rich men, which should rather have been executed by wise men.