How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

Most people go through their whole lives without killing anybody. False argument.