Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.

...I'm no longer the scales most lovers are, weighing the deeds and gifts and treasures proffered against those received or stolen from the other, trying always to bring into fatal balance two separate things.

Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.