“In the literary as well as military world, most powerful abilities will often be found concealed under a rustic garb.”

I would have a man generous to his country, his neighbors, his kindred, his friends, and most of all his poor friends. Not like some who are most lavish with those who are able to give most of them.

Now, that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is, should have regard of mankind, is a toy and vanity worthy to be laughed at.

Human nature is fond of novelty.

Our youth and manhood are due to our country, but our declining years are due to ourselves.

I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness.

From the end spring new beginnings.

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.

Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides.

Lust is an enemy to the purse, a foe to the person, a canker to the mind, a corrosive to the conscience, a weakness of the wit, a besotter of the senses, and finally, a mortal bane to all the body.

A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.

The only thing man knows instinctively is how to weep.

Our civilization depends largely on paper.

Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life.

The lust of avarice as so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.

It has become quite a common proverb that in wine there is truth.

Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides.

People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do. We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it’s more like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a country without an army.

I find skydiving really hard. I broke my back while skydiving when I was in the military, and for 18 months all my nightmares were about falling.

Direct pressure always tends to harden and consolidate the resistance of an opponent.

The effect to be sought is the dislocation of the opponent’s mind and dispositions – such an effect is the true gauge of an indirect approach.

The more usual reason for adopting a strategy of limited aim is that of awaiting a change in the balance of force … The essential condition of such a strategy is that the drain on him should be disproportionately greater than on oneself.

No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.

To win the cause we all believe in, the spread of true democracy all over the world, we need to win by example, not just with speeches but by example; not just with military might but by gaining the respect of the world.

The higher level of grand strategy [is] that of conducting war with a far-sighted regard to the state of the peace that will follow.