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

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.

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.

The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me. That is the real accolade.

You have a career, the reason why we’re still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

Chicks love dudes who are successful who happen to have money – do you know what I mean? Chicks are attracted to dudes that are doing their own thing.

Procrastinate strategically… Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity but it can be a valuable resource for creativity.

Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren’t hits.

People are stupid. There’s a lot of dumb stuff that’s successful.

A lot of guys and people in our society think that chicks just love dudes with money.

A successful film is a good film, and a non-successful film is a bad film. It’s as simple as that.