After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

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

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.