Samuel Johnson

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others… This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. … If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.

The internet provides access to an extraordinary range of information, opinion, and interpretation. But as with any source, it is useful to the extent that it is used with discrimination and insight.

When you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.

The despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual.

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?

As far as oligarchs who acquire sports team abroad, and invest money abroad, I wouldn’t treat this phenomenon as something bad.

The real surprise in the [2016] election was the Sanders campaign, which broke with a long tradition of pretty much bought elections, and was stopped only by machinations of the Obama-Clinton party managers.

Who is going to help them abroad? They are just persecuted there. Conditions are created making their work impossible. This is a big mistake by those who are doing this in the West.

The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’.

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her.

China and North Korea have already proposed that North Korea freeze its nuclear and missile programs. The proposal, though, was rejected at once by Washington…because…[the proposal] calls on the U.S. to halt its threatening military exercises on North Korea’s borders…

Let’s not turn this into blaming people who travel, work and migrate around Europe, let’s instead ensure governments respond to the needs of all communities and that unscrupulous employers that are grossly exploiting migrant workers and trying to limit their rights need to be dealt with.

America didn’t invent human rights. Those rights are common to all people: nations, cultures, and religions cannot choose to simply opt out of them.