That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.
It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.
Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!
What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!
Another of Cicero’s maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.
It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you’re forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.
Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.
You can’t make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.
If long hitting is the thing that causes the spectators to whistle through their teeth in wonderment, why not play tournaments up and down an expansive stadium?
If you spend too long trying to avoid death, you will be dead in at least one way.
Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.
A police state is a country run by criminals.
History is too important to be left to the historians.
The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.
A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.
I’ve always just wanted to earn my living by writing. The best thing is to go into my study in the morning and put words together.
What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason.
Humans have changed little over time. We think we’ve invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism.
You can’t ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can’t repeal human nature.
Working 14 hours a day until you’re 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.