After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

A human being is a deciding being.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them.

Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

A man is great by deeds, not by birth.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

I despise people who depend on these things [heroin and cocaine]. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

No mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.