“And what’s interesting, and I don’t think a lot of Americans understand this fact, is that, one, most new jobs are created by small businesses; two, most small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax, or many small businesses pay tax there.”
“I just didn’t want to get out there anymore; I didn’t want to get back into what I call ‘the swamp.’ And the other reason why is I don’t think it’s good for the presidency for a former president to be opining about his successor. President Obama’s got plenty of critics – and I’m just not gonna be one.”
“I told you I’m not going to criticize my successor. I’ll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don’t believe that persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to cause terrorists to change their mind.”
“I’m hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.”
“Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history – revisionist historians is what I like to call them.”
“Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.”
“Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”
“No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.”
“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”
“If a man does his best, what else is there?”
“If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.”
“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”
“There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.”
“There is only one sort of discipline, perfect discipline.”
“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”
“The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”
“I am thinking about launching a wine website where there is a deal and the crowd can dictate how cheap it can get.”
“When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn’t even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.”
“We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.”
“Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?”
“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
“If there is no God, everything is permitted.”
“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”
“There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.”
“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”
“To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.”
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
“Without a struggle, there can be no progress.”
“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
“Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.”
“Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.”
“How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.”
“If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.”
“In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.”
“There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.”
“There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.”
“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.”
“There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion, and I’ll show you a hundred retrogressions.”
“In art, at a certain level, there is no ‘better than.’ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.”
“In art, at a certain level, there is no ‘better than.’ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.”
“My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.”
“When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‘I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.’ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.”
“Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.”
“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”
“Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.”
“Where there is injury let me sow pardon.”
“Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.”
“There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.”
“There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.”
“There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.”
“There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.”
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
“There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.”
“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”
“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.”
“Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”
“Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.”
“Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.”
“I don’t think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.”
“I would not vote for the mayor. It’s not just because he didn’t invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.”
“It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.”
“On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.”
“There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.”
“There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.”
“There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.”
“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”
“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
“Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.”
“There are no second acts in American lives.”
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
“Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm.”
“There is just one life for each of us: our own.”
“There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.”
“There is the sky, which is all men’s together.”
“I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.”
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
“Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.”
“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”
“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
“There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
“When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.”
“No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.”
“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”
“There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.”
“There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.”
“When humor goes, there goes civilization.”
“No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”
“Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”
“There is nothing good or evil save in the will.”
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
“But it’s a journey and the sad thing is you only learn from experience, so as much as someone can tell you things, you have to go out there and make your own mistakes in order to learn.”
“I don’t think my dad really knew what to do with me, as a daughter. He treated me like a boy; my brother and I were treated the same. He didn’t do kid stuff. There were no kid’s menus; you weren’t allowed to order off the kid’s menu at dinner – we had to try something from the adult menu.”