Keep a goverment poor and weak and it's your servant; when it is rich and powerful it becomes your master.

Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

Vengeance is a strange human motivation --- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature!

I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.

Sanity, it would seem, was a dangerously contagious disease.

You know, it's quite all right to give the underdog a hand, but only one hand. Keep the other hand on your pistol - or he'll try to eat the one you gave him!

Apparently, on New Texas, killing a politician was not malum in se, and was mallum prohibitorum only to the extent that what happened to the politician was in excess of what he deserved.