More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. Armour encumbers, restricts the body and soul within it. But it also protects. Blows are blunted. Feelings lose their edge, leaving us to suffer naught but a plague of bruises, and, after a time, bruises fade.

The lesson of history is that no one learns.

It is one thing to lead by example with half a dozen soldiers at your back. It is wholly another with ten thousand.

Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.

Paradise belonged to the innocent. Which was why it was and would ever remain empty. And that is what makes it a paradise.

The only death I fear is dying ignorant.

Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of human condition. No, they proclaimed morality was an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable