Folly is a child of power.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.

The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

Milk many cows but make your own butter.

Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

Heaven... I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.

I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior.

If at first you don't succeed, pay someone else to do it for you.

Europe is acting in a very self-destructive manner, but is doing so because it's trying to be loyal to the United States.

... the running shoe ... could be called the Swiss Army knife of footwear ... What appeal is there to a shoe whose only selling point is comfort?

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

Grief is illness. You cannot breathe; you cannot walk or eat or sleep. The sickness is entire, the body and the spirit.