He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it." Pope Alexander

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.

We are so blinkered by progress, so preoccupied with where we want to go and how fast we can travel, that many of us have lost the ability to simply ‘stop’.

What if the meek inherited the Earth and we had to defend ourselves from Martians?

My only worry about tweeting and modern technology is how it has crept into even the darkest corners of the absolute global village we live in.

I grew up around the theatre. My mother is an actress. I would fall asleep on tons of theatre chairs. It's in my blood; it's in my spirit and my fabric of who I am.

I've always been pretty careful at keeping track of my spending, so using my debit card is often the easiest way of doing that.

I'm proud to be a New York Yankee.

There should be full engagement to protect our country from a grave threat, which is the weakest foreign policy since Jimmy Carter.

It's sad when you see somebody that talented that passes away and doesn't have to.

I prioritise my time so what needs to be done, gets done.

When you get a lot of money thrown at you, you can make some dumb decisions without the right advice.