Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) "lighthouses erected in the sea of time." They are companions , teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.