Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
Jonathan Swift

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Charlie Chaplin

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie

Whenever we're afraid, it's because we don't know enough. If we understood enough, we would never be afraid.
Earl Nightingale

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
Virginia Woolf

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
Marcel Proust

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.
Norman Cousins

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Clarence Darrow

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
Niels Bohr

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
Niels Bohr

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
Niels Bohr

The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.
Hank Aaron

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I've never quite understood why people marry; marriage is just an invented structure.
Julie Christie

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Charles Baudelaire

I often talked to Bing Crosby, and while I liked him, I never understood why he was so popular. To me his voice was just a gimmick.
Hedy Lamarr

A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
Henry A. Kissinger