“Many things that I would not care to tell to any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller's stall.”

“This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter.”

“If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take no care for it.”

“As conversation with men is wonderfully helpful, so is a visit to foreign lands...to whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them upon those of others."--Montaigne”

“He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”

“If someone presses me to say why I loved him, I feel that I cannot express it other than by answering, 'Because it was he, because it was I.”

“[Just as any foreigner is not fully human.]”

“The danger was not that I would do wrong, but that I would do nothing”

“does know himself never considers external things to be his;”

“[Sweet it is during a tempest when the gales lash the waves to watch from the shore another man’s great striving.]3”

“Retire within yourselves; but first prepare yourselves to receive yourselves there. It would be madness to trust yourselves to yourselves if you do not know how to control yourselves. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in company.”

“I believe it to be true that dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.”

“If any one be in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him under foot.”

“All things in it are in constant motion - the earth, the rocks of the caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt - both within the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.”

“When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.”

“Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies. Even on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our arses.”

Sometimes it's good to fall down to see who will pick you up.

The public has become my fairy godmother.

This is where you see the truth of entertainment, because it is not edited. You see it on stage as it is happening. Even if we fall down or forget our words, it's a part of live entertainment.

I'm a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don't trust diamonds and gold.

“Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.”

“Fame is fickle, and I know it. It has its compensations but it also has its drawbacks, and I’ve experienced them both.”

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.

Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.