If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

The most purely free decision one can make—and thus, the highest order of spirit on Earth—is believing in something without evidential knowledge.

Lord, give me strength and ability to understand when I can heal, but give me the wisdom to understand when my profession is useless.

There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.

There ain't no rules here, we're trying to accomplish something...All this talk about rules...When the deal goes down...we make 'em up as we go along.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

We have global communication and yet confrontation is more common than dialogue.

The artist's quest is to succeed in combining and balancing all compositional attributes and physical elements into those that are purely spiritual. That is the secret of art.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

You know, I started out really hot out of the box. Then I've definitely had and up-and-down career. And when things started cooling off again, it frustrated me.

The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.