An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

Am I not a man and brother?

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

If a danger threatens you, you threaten that danger too

Fans of my books have just been supremely nice.

You don't get over it because 'it' is the person you loved.

I'm proud to say I'm the only Slaughterhouse member who has not rewritten a verse yet, and that's the ongoing joke in the group, 'cause everybody has rewrote their sh*t except for me.

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.

I think I can be closed in. I can close this outer shell, cut myself off and be quite cold. I can cut other people off if I need to. I don't think I'm angry, though... Maybe my wife would disagree.

It is like taking the sun out of the world, to bereave human life of friendship.

One of my greatest fears is not being able to change, to be caught in a never-ending cycle of sameness. Growth is so important.

I suppose I've got a reputation for playing quite extreme characters and making them quite believable.

The white moth to the closing vine, The bee to the open clover, And the Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood Ever the wide world over.