It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‚solution‘ to society’s ‚problems.‘

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

‚Young Indiana Jones’ was one of the happiest times I ever had, so I love television.

It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

In many ways, when you’re a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is harmony in the house; when there is harmony in the house, there is order in the nation; when there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.

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

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

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.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‚security,‘ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it’s a good thing they’ll be reading a newspaper on a screen.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

The good of the people is the greatest law.

It’s a very confusing era that we’re in.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

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.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

If people lose faith in their government, the result is the same whether or not the loss of confidence is justified.

I know I’m more on television, and I’m more recognisable than maybe even the players because they run and train, but I just stand there, and my face does all these funny things that everyone can see all the time.

I don’t even know what the issues are. I haven’t paid attention to politics in a long time. It’s actually not something that I really even enjoy. It’s way off my radar.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

All impeachments, I guess, are political.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society.

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets.

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

There’s a lot of revisionist history that goes on these days about Iraq.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

The press is the enemy.

I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

I live in a crazy time.

Doing Saturday Night Live definitely affects my relationship with my girlfriend and with my family, because you feel so much pressure to do well that night. But I think everyone’s grown to accept that and so they give me my space at the show.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.