“I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.”

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.

If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

Sometimes I lose my temper.

It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal – hardly inspiring – standards of political conduct.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West.

Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.

You have writers that write about crazy characters, but that doesn’t mean the writer himself is crazy.

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.

What’s better? Dogs or broomsticks? I mean will the world really ever know?

When men call women ambitious they mean pushy.

The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function.

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.