It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.