But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.

Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them. Like them, he was slandered and misunderstood.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error.

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.

Rock music should be gross: that's the fun of it. It gets up and drops its trousers.

The amount of speculation surrounding my romantic life is astounding. It's strange how involved people get: invested and angry, really disappointed.

A trustworthy leader goes the extra mile to remedy strained relationships, even when it doesn't appear to be required.

Teaching...can be likened to a conversation in which you listen to the speaker carefully before you reply.

People are reticent to give a newborn the hepatitis B vaccine and often delay it.

It is an obvious and blatant stupidity beyond my ability to articulate how dumb it is for us not to teach our children how to run the government.

My hobby is fishing for girls.