If everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

My wife, the star I steer by.

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.

The Spartans do not ask how many but where they are.

What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don’t need to be wasted on naming things.

You won’t solve your problems by drowning others in them.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

That got me a look so intense I was unable to interpret it - like the way cats sometimes fix on you. What they mean by the look is completely beyond understanding; but it's meant for you, you alone.

Talk uses up ideas. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.

All four days I didn't think. I just hit. Squeaky (Medlen, his caddy) said 'kill' and I killed it.

In Ireland the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs.

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white-then melts for ever . . .