I don’t worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It’s a matter of just sitting down and working.
I am not the kind of person I want to be.
To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.
If I’d been born in my grandfather’s time, I’d have made my grandfather’s mistakes. Theres no doubt of it. I just don’t want to make my grandfather’s mistakes today.
Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?
It’s easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.
I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion.
Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.
Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definitions.
Love is not a mood, but a dynamic way of being.
To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers.
What is the son but an extension of the father?
Control the coinage and the courts – let the rabble have the rest.
That path leads ever down into stagnation.
You know it’s love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.
A world is supported by four things: the learning of wise, the justice of great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
To know the future absolutely it to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future.
Peace for any prolonged period of time is impossible. Humans have a natural thirst for chaos and war is the most readily available form of chaos.