History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

People perish. Books are immortal.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

But only a fool sails into combat with nature