“The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.”

Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources.

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

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.

If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute-the moral courage to terminate mistakes.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

Completeness is rare in history.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.