I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor.

I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

He had kept his head, kept his health and his strength, bearing up under a weight of work and worry that only a few could have carried.

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.

Find something to do that you love because then the work itself is always the reward not the recompense. And if you love what you're doing you probably do better at it than doing something you don't love and therefore you'll be compensated appropriately.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.