The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.
A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
An uncle of mine emigrated to Canada and couldn’t take his guitar with him. When I found it in the attic, I’d found a friend for life.
Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.
I love Marlon Brando. Never seem him bad, just less good.
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.
When I stepped into the box, I felt the at-bat belonged to me. Everybody else was there for my convenience. The pitcher was there to throw me a ball to hit. The catcher was there to throw it back to him if he didn’t give me what I wanted the first time. And the umpire was lucky that he was close enough to watch.
I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.
Every human being has a bit of gangster in him.
Righteousness has to do with the vertical standard that God gives us to please Him. Justice has to do with the horizontal expression of that righteous standard in the lives of others.
You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‘shooting an unarmed child,’ when that ‘child’ was beating him bloody.
Don’t force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.
So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
I hate organized religion. I think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think you have to pick your own God and be true to him. I always say ‘him’ rather than ‘her.’ Maybe it’s because of my generation, but I don’t like the idea of a female God. I see God as a benevolent male.
We called him Tortoise because he taught us.
If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher’s cleaver.
God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with him.
I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant delighting of ourselves in the Lord, and by a submission of our desires to His will.
Fate leads him who follows it, and drags him who resist.
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.
The benefit a father can confer on his son is to make him fit to occupy the front rank in the assembly of the learned.
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
I really enjoyed playing Vinny Vedecci, the Italian talk show host. He was the first character I ever came up with where I gave him a name and a way of dressing.
Simon Bolivar, when history led him – and as Karl Marx said, men can make history, but only as far as history allows us to do so – when history took Bolivar and made him the leader of the independence process in Venezuela, he made that process revolutionary.
Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.
Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.
I’d call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.
Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.
If the press really thinks Obama is Lincoln, they ought to treat him like they treated Bush, ’cause that’s how they treated Lincoln. His critics compared Lincoln to an ape; they called him an illiterate baboon.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
Happiness is your dentist telling you it won’t hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.
My father and I have a very good relationship. We always got along. But I always scold him.
Be simple in words, manners, and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you.
The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.
He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.
If I look in the mirror when I get up or before going to bed at night, I see a man of average ugliness with stubble, an unruly mane of hair, a squint nose, slightly protruding ears, and bags under my eyes. But I also see a man who’s completely happy with the figure staring back at him.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
Think well before selecting your leader, and when you have selected him, follow him. But in case you find his policy detrimental to your interests, kick him out.
I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on.
He is one of the finest and kindest human beings I have come across. When you meet him, you will understand why he is the Jackie Chan. It’s not just for his work but also the kind of person he is.
Banking types should take their cue from Gordon Gekko. Or pick the best-looking banker in their firm and copy him.
My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.
If I meet Putin, I’ll say to him: ‘So you’ve finally given us back our territory, how much more are you ready to give as compensation money for taking away our land and helping those who took part in the escalation in Crimea and Donbass?’
I asked a ref if he could give me a technical foul for thinking bad things about him. He said, of course not. I said, well, I think you stink. And he gave me a technical. You can’t trust em.
Like him or not, you really should respect the fact that Justin Amash makes his political decisions based only on his principles – which is truly refreshing in our hyper-partisan era.
We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.
Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.
His father is governor of Media, and though he has the greatest command given him of all the rest of my generals, he still covetously desires more, and my being without issue spurs him on to this wicked design. But Philotas takes wrong measures.
Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!
I know that I will never find my father in any other man who comes into my life, because it is a void in my life that can only be filled by him.
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.
What each man feared would happen to himself, did not trouble him when he saw that it would ruin another.
My father? I never knew him. Never even seen a picture of him.
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.
Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.
Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically.
It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.
The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.
