Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.

The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.

Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.

If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.

He was not only a bore; he bored for England.

Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.