“The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.”

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.

What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

Justice at all costs’ is not justice.

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.

As an entrepreneur in India put it: ‘Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

I’m very specific about scripts that I like. I don’t have a master plan or, like, a game plan. I don’t have a chart that I’m following or anything like that. I’m very much playing it by ear.

Certain things just happen and it’s undeniable, you just go that way. But I don’t have a specific path I’m following, I’m just playing it by ear.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

I just got an ear for the kind of things I like.

I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.

The ultimate truth is like the flavour of an apple which you can’t see with the eye or hear with the ear.