“It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.”

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

A coward’s courage is in his tongue.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Those who have been intoxicated with power… can never willingly abandon it.

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing as they must if they believe they can do nothing. There is nothing worse because the council of despair is declaration of irresponsibility; it is Pilate washing his hands.

When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.

Justice is never given; it is exacted.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

There’s nothing better than having an experience now that’s the exact same thing.

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…

Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

I often say to my assistants, “Never trust anybody,” but what I mean is that you should never trust someone else to do a job exactly the way you would want it done.