You have to create tension between reality and aspiration

Yesterday's success formula is often today's obsolete dogma ... We must continually challenge the past so that we can renew ourselves each day.

Companies that succeed are driven by internal ambition. Stock price doesn’t drive them. Ambition and values drive them.

You cannot have faith in people unless you take action to improve and develop them.

The ability to seize initiative is the most essential quality of any truly successful manager.

Effective managers proactively control their tasks and the expectations of their major stakeholders, which allows them to meet strategic goals rather than fight fires.

Then an argument would ensue because they were men with different ideas.

I resent my barber when he charges the full cost after he cuts my hair but he says he's charging me for finding it.

From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

To be taken seriously about doing something creative and probably travel a lot. That was my motivation. I knew I was good, I knew I could write. I also knew you could get laid really easily.

...without a Respectable Navy, Alas America!

Diplomats lie with a heavy sense of destiny.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.

The persecution of genius fosters its influence.

What’s the point of being bad when there’s nothing good to stop you?