In life, man proposes, God disposes.

A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.

It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop)

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.