“They make a desert and call it peace.”

The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.

Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.

In all things there is a law of cycles.

Forethought and prudence are the proper qualities of a leader. [Lat., Ratio et consilium, propriae ducis artes.]

[The Jews have] an attitude of hostility and hatred towards all others.

The Romans brought devestation, but they called it peace.

Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader.

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.

The word liberty has been falsely used by persons who, being degenerately profligate in private life, and mischievous in public, had no hope left but in fomenting discord.

The lust for power, for dominating others, inflames the heart more than any other passion.

Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

Flattery labors under the odious charge of servility.

Cruelty is fed, not weakened, by tears.

Bodies are slow of growth, but are rapid in their dissolution. [Lat., Corpora lente augescent, cito extinguuntur.]

A just city should favor justice and the just, hate tyranny and injustice, and give them both their just deserts.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

I grew up in a desert, which has no kind of imagination.

The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ?

We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR.

In their country, two fellow coutrymen whose paths berely cross (or see each only only briefly) with inferrence, would effusively rush themselves up (or throw themselves) into each other arms if they would happen to meet in a desert, among Cannibles.

It’s a treat to see the sun rise over the desert. What am I saying? It’s a treat to fire off a rocket car over the desert!

The marvellous instinct with which women are usually credited seems too often to desert them on the only occasions when it would be of any real use. One would say it was there for trivialities only