We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

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

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.