The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.

I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.

No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.