No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

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

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

All of us, as human beings, seek to be respected. Even those who do not respect others have a deep seated desire to be respected.

Skin color doesn't make you different, ' Melody said. 'We're all the same on the inside.' 'The only people who ever say that, ' Raymon replied, 'are white.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

I sort of feel I'm only as good as the last record I made. I was on as soon as I finish it I immediately put it aside and move on to the next project.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

I am a Bay Area guy, no question.

Dreams come a size too big so we can grow into them.

One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.

Human nature is the same now as when Adam hid from the presence of God; the consciousness of wrong makes us unwilling to meet those whom we have offended.

This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.