I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

If you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!

If the metrics you are looking at aren't useful in optimizing your strategy - stop looking at them.

A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first.

If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.