“The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.”

When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

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.

Fun, fighting, and feeding! These are the three indispensable elements of the boy’s world.

This is what I tell, especially young women, fight the big fights. Don’t fight the little fight… Be the first one in, be the last one out. Do your homework, choose your battles. Don’t whine, and don’t be the one who complains about everything. Fight the big fight.

It’s not who wins the fight that’s important, it’s being willing to fight. If you get challenged and renege, everyone wants to take a shot at you.

No man can fight his way to the top and stay at the top without exercising the fullest measure of grit, courage, determination, resolution.

When will you give up these mad adventures, and leave others to fight their own battles and to save their own lives as best they may?’ When your ladyship has ceased to be the most admired woman in Europe, namely, when I am in my grave.

Even if I have to stand alone, I will not be afraid to stand alone. I’m going to fight for you. I’m going to fight for what’s right. I’m going to fight to hold people accountable

Fighting is pure chaos, and to be a good fighter you simply have to be prepared mentally and physically to handle that chaos.

Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth… these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.