in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

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

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.