“If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.”

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.

Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.

I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they’re just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.

Negotiating means getting the best of your opponent.

We didn’t see [the NBA lockout] as a victory at all.

Stay in the Word. The moment you start letting go of that, you’re on the road to compromise.

I oppose any course of action that would compromise these objectives.

It was far from what we set it out to accomplish in bargaining, but I thought it was a fair compromise.

We lack a political culture, a culture of compromise. We in Poland, as well as the Hungarians, have never learned this sort of thing.

We swear by the Quran and Sunnah, and we will not compromise with any infidel… Islam is the truth and all else is falsehood.