read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.