“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”

“One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand”

“Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for a man may be worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be worst for a man.”

“Will you understand what I'm going to tell you? … No, you're not going to be able to understand it. … That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.”

“I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.”

“The controlling Intelligence understands its own nature, and what it does, and whereon it works.”

“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.”

“Don't you understand that wanting does not belong here, because that is what wounds, and there is never an end to it.”

“No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces, too, of the past. We, in the United States, acknowledge such an injustice in our own history: The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated.”

“Horror was rooted in sympathy… in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.”