People have hope because they cannot see Death standing behind them.
There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day
Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars?. . . There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.
I don't need handcuffs to enslave a woman.
Politics isn't what defines a person, and it shouldn't define a relationship. I made the mistake of letting that intrude on my relationships.
The authority of example and considerations of character, unlike pudding, are not whipped up in an instant.