A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your response later on.

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

The environment is everything that isn't me.

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.

We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.

History is more or less bunk.  

Sleep is the best meditation.

It is difficult to violently suppressed people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.