Quotes to inspire and reflect

[ Suggesting a name for the city of the Birds :] Cloudcuckooland.

The old are in a second childhood.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

Where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could have been.

Thought . . . is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately . . . no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

To abolish the fences of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man’s liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom.

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

Power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

[ After thinking of a method to test the purity of gold :] Eureka!

This new union—for up until now stage sets and costumes on the one hand and choreography on the other were only superficially linked—has given rise in [the ballet] Parade to a kind of “sur-realisme.”

Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur; et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum .

Blacks should be used to play whites. For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices, and even their odors. Often our survival had depended on the accurate reading of a white man’s chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman’s hand.

Vienne la nuit, sonne l’heure ,

You may write me down in history

It’s in the reach of my arms,

Den grimme Ælling .

But what did he see in the clear stream below? His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.

Keiserens nye Klæder .

Then they knew that the lady they had lodged was a real Princess, since she had felt the one small pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather-beds, for it was quite impossible for any one but a true Princess to be so tender.

Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.

[ Of his love for his adoptive stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Farrow :] The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic.

[ Harry Block, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] The most beautiful words in the English language are not “I love you,” but “It’s benign.”

[ Danny Rose, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] The man has an axe. There’s two of us. There’ll be four of us in no time.

[ Sandy Bates, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only . . . only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

[ Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, after having sex :] That was the most fun I ever had without laughing.

[ Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] That’s essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

[ Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, on Los Angeles :] I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife—a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it’s being held.

How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not “the thing with feathers.” The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.

[ Boris Grushenko, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] It’s not the quantity of your sexual relations that count, it’s the quality. On the other hand, if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it.

[ Boris Grushenko, played by Woody Allen, responding to “Sex without love is an empty experience” :] Yes, but—as empty experiences go—it’s one of the best!

[ Miles Monroe, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] My brain? It’s my second favorite organ.

[ Miles Monroe, played by Woody Allen, speaking about what he believes in :] Sex and death. Two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you’re not nauseous.

[ Allan Felix, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] I hate the beach. I hate the sun. I’m pale and I’m redheaded. I don’t tan—I stroke.

[ Miles Monroe, played by Woody Allen, responding to the comment “It’s hard to believe that you haven’t had sex for two hundred years” :] Two hundred and four if you count my marriage.

[ Fielding Mellish, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.

[ Fielding Mellish, played by Woody Allen, choosing between freedom and death :] Well, freedom is wonderful. On the other hand, if you’re dead, it’s a tremendous drawback to your sex life.

[ Louise, played by Janet Margolin, speaking :] He never made the ten-most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting. It’s who you know.

[ Virgil Starkwell, played by Woody Allen, speaking :] I was so touched by her that, after fifteen minutes, I wanted to marry her and, after half an hour, I completely gave up the idea of snatching her purse.

All the sincerity in Hollywood you could stuff in a flea’s navel and still have room left to conceal eight carroway seeds and an agent’s heart.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 P.M. to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished even before lunch.

[ Catchphrase of character Senator Claghorn :] That’s a joke, son!

No Viet Cong ever called me “nigger.”

My new style on the ropes is called the “Rope-A-Dope.”

[ Description of upcoming fight against Joe Frazier in the Philippines, at a press conference announcing the fight, New York :] A thriller in Manila.