I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

We do not judge the people we love.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage, or of principle.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Change alone is unchanging.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

I believe in universal health care. And I am not afraid to say so.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.