Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

Books are humanity in print.

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

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

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few

HONOR WEARS DIFFERENT COATS TO DIFFERENT EYES.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

In all our associations; in all our agreements let us never lose sight of this fundamental maxim - that all power was originally lodged in, and consequently is derived from, the people.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

In the gay (Catholic) community, it would seem, the maxim is: love the sin and love the sinner, but hate anyone who calls it a sin or him a sinner.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.

I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.

You know, I'd love to do a Maxim shoot. But I'm not going to do it, because that's just stupid to do.

They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that 'one man is as good as another;' a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.

The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.

There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current one, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.

To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it.

It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.