To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.

Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them. Like them, he was slandered and misunderstood.

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

See things in terms of Potential. Recognize:Your Amazing Potential.

And the world so hard to understand is the world you can't live without.

A gentleman would be ashamed should his deeds not match his words.

Keep your morale high, in spite of setbacks. At the end you are bound to succeed.

I made career decisions that came from the part of me who wanted to shun the limelight.

It's hard to think of a 16-month child being anything other than a delight to be around.

Faith is the ability to see things that don't yet exist. Faith, though, can turn difficulty into reality, positive reality.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

I belong to quite a lot of learned societies. We collect firearms and discuss them at dinners and clubs and things.