Books are the carriers of civilization. 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 (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

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

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

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.