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

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

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

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.

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.

The intelligent investor shouldn’t ignore Mr. Market entirely. Instead, you should do business with him- but only to the extent that it serves your interests.

We should learn and reflect to the best of our capacity, but when we reach a point where we are unable to make sense of life, we should supplant faith for understanding, and reflect again on what we do know.

No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

No one can please everyone. Your mental peace is more important. If you are in peace, then others around you will feel peace. So your best effort should be to work on yourself.

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

Scouts should be progressive and should be adapting. If you’re gay or not it’s irrelevant, Scouting values respect.

Fondle the woman in your life once for every thousand times you play with your private parts. That should be just about right.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.