“America is a Nation with a mission – and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace – a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”
“I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together.”
“I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.”
“I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.”
“I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun.”
“Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.”
“States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.”
“The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.”
“The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”
“I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.”
“One changes from day to day, and… after a few years have passed one has completely altered.”
“Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn’t give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor ever lose a war.”
“If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.”
“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”
“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!”
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
“I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”
“If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”
“If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.”
“People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.”
“Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
“Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.”
“When someone is impatient and says, ‘I haven’t got all day,’ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?”
“Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I’m going to continue fighting for the end user.”
“Bordeaux would be naive not to recognize that Robert Parker was driving the brand equity. If the next generation doesn’t care about Chateau Pichon-Lalande, then you have a problem.”
“Do you know how many companies have wanted me to do an energy drink for them because I named my book ‘Crush It!’? It might be fun one day, but right now I think it would undermine the personal brand I’ve built.”
“Here’s how I work: It’s 2013, and most marketers are operating like it’s 2009. I’m always trying to market like it’s 2015, but not like it’s 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren’t practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality.”
“I have Internet fame. Real fame is more intense.”
“I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I’m just not that kind of dude.”
“I want people to know their palate is a snowflake. We all like different things. Why should we all have the same taste in wines?”
“I want to sit with 80- and 90-year-old people more than anyone. They have played this game before. Not one of them has told me, ‘I wish I had more money.’”
“If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.”
“It’s insane to me to ask anybody to be what they’re not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That’s always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.”
“One of the things that I’m really proud of is that I have really good timing. It’s very easy for me to see what’s coming up and it’s no coincidence that I went headfirst into wine and then headfirst into new media – none at all.”
“People who build family businesses are not classically trained. They have to deal with an enormous amount of politics. You think corporate politics are tough? Go work for your dad or your mom.”
“Too many companies think they want to do a video blog to sell merchandise, but if you turn your site into QVC, you lose. I have an audience that trusts me. It’s about building a global brand – not selling four more bottles of Pinot Grigio.”
“We’re living in what I like to call the ‘Thank You Economy,’ because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way – and do it authentically – are going to have a prayer of competing.”
“You cannot underestimate people’s ability to spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. It’s a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably.”
“You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.”
“You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.”
“I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.”
“A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.”
“Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.”
“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”
“I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste. They are boring, and they all have faces like unbaked rolls.”
“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.”
“Of the opposite sex, I have the moustache and, in general, the face.”
“Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.”
“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”
“Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.”
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.”
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
“If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.”
“My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.”
“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”
“We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.”
“We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.”
“I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life – in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God.”
“I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them.”
“People often remark that I’m pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you’ve got to have talent and know how to use it.”
“Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing – if I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.”
“What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can. I’ve been criticized on many, many occasions, because of – acquaintances, and what have you.”
“A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.”
“Because I’m not in a record deal, I don’t have to operate in an album format.”
“I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more.”
“I have no delusions about my likability in every scenario. I know that in order to get things done the way you want them, oftentimes your position will be unpopular.”
“I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films.”
“It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week; it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.”
“Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?”
“We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I’m going to be alive, I want to be challenged – to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn’t an easy way, but it’s a rewarding way.”
“When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‘No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.’”
“Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.”
“You just do what you can and you have as much fun as possible.”
“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.”
“I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.”
“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
“Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.”
“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
“It is not fitting, when one is in God’s service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look.”
“No one is to be called an enemy, all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves.”
“Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens, you have made them bright, precious and fair.”
“While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.”
“Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.”
“Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.”
“Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.”
“People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.”
“The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.”
“Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.”
“I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief… All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.”
“I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.”
“Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. Far the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it.”
“She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.”
“Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”
“Why do people sit up so late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have no time in the day to themselves.”
“Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.”
“At times, I’ve referred to Christ’s miracles, and have said, ‘Well, Christ multiplied the fish and the loaves to feed the people. That is precisely what we want to do with the Revolution and socialism.’”
“Chavez, who came out of the ranks of the Venezuelan Army, is methodical and tireless. I have observed him over the course of 17 years, since his first visit to Cuba. He is an extremely humanitarian and law-abiding person; he has never taken revenge on anybody.”
“I am Fidel Castro and we have come to liberate Cuba.”