The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

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.

Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.

This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored.

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

My family, my friends, and skiing... thats it for me, thats my life. The joy I get from skiing, thats worth dying for.

It starts with being unearthed. I like that word, unearthed, because we are being unearthed.

The Internet is a perfect diversion from learning... it opens many doors that lead to empty rooms.

I've always been attracted to action stuff.

I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers, or brain cleansers.

I should deem a man-of-war incomplete without a body of Marines...imbued with that esprit that has so long characterized the "Old Corps."