The only medicine for suffering crime and all other woes of mankind is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

A mistake is simply another way of doing things.

I am still profoundly troubled by the war in Nicaragua. The United States launched a covert war against another nation in violation of international law a war that was wrong and immoral.

For the sake of the troops for the love of the troops we must not add yet another casualty to this war. We must not let truth be a casualty of this war.

I don't think the Middle East could afford another war.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive too innocent to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

As for charity it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned and the ultimate consequence to the general good are apt to be at complete war with one another.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe having surveyed a few boxes full of letters diaries bank statements and photographs that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

So far as hypotheses are concerned let no one expect anything certain from astronomy which cannot furnish it lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Violence does in truth recoil upon the violent and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error and another to put him in possession of the truth.

When you're caught up in the storm or you know just the turmoil of everything that there is another side and you do get through it. And you know just standing by the truth and doing the right thing.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

I am saddened by how people treat one another and how we are so shut off from one another and how we judge one another when the truth is we are all one connected thing. We are all from the same exact molecules.

A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie.

We often want one thing and pray for another not telling the truth even to the gods.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak and another to hear.