Friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious thing.

War is the health of the state.

If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.

One keeps healthy in wartime...by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

A good discussion increases the dimensions of everyone who takes part.

We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear.

Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.

He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the elephant goes.

All we can ever do in the way of good to people is to encourage them to do good to themselves.

When you are searching for knowledge, knowledge is also searching for you.

Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents' Code.

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

Your past is not your potential.

For each inclosed spirit is a star Enlightening his own little sphere

Costs are incurred whenever any group is treated as lesser or the other, whether they are women, racial, or religious minorities, or the LGBT.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

Words are the instruments you play to the song of your ideas, you're just playing covers.