"Awesome quotes (mostly related to Diplomacy)

"Anyone who isn't with me opposes me, and anyone who isn't working with me is actually working against me." —Matthew 12:30

"Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house." —Matthew 12:29

"To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him." —Oscar Wilde

"There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures and grossly common in its aims..." ―Oscar Wilde

"From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it it difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved when one of the two must be lacking." —Niccolo Machiavelli

"A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise." —Niccolo Machiavelli

"Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions." —Jonathan Swift

"Hense I infer, that religious men do with all the peace and quietness seek of Heaven the good of the earth; but soldiers and we knights do put in execution that which they demand, defending it with the valour of our arms and the files of our swords; not under any roof, but under the wide heavens, made, as it were, in summer a mark to the insupportable sunbeams, and in wither to the range of withering frosts. So that we are the ministers of God on earth, and the armies wherewith He executeth His justice; and as the affairs of war, and things thereunto pertaining, cannot be put into execution without sweat, labour, and travail, it follows that those which profess warfare take, questionless, greater pain than [them] which, in quiet, peace, and rest do pray unto God that He will favour and assist those that need it." —Miguel de Cervantes

"Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less."
—James Joyce

"In both the capitalist and socialist worlds, an unconscious presumption has long since settled into place that the present is 'better' than the past and that the future will bring still more betterment. Progress, we are admonished in both quarters, is occurring. This reassuring belief rests securely on statistical charts and tables certifying the steady upward tilt of economic production in every 'advanced' and 'advancing' nation in the world."
—Lawrence Goodwyn

"Johnson assumed that in war, as in the Senate, everyone knew the rules of the game, what kind of agreement would be reasonable, and that eventually an agreement would be reached. The need for continuing relationships required at least this much. But this assumption closed his mind to the argument that Frances FitzGerald and others have since made: that the Vietnamese people were interested in unanimity, not pluralism."
—Doris Kearns Goodwin

"This paradox cannot escape notice. Johnson was celebrating the possible reconstruction of a country even as his orders brought mounting destruction."
—Doris Kearns Goodwin

"Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and thier abstract relationsips and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objections interacting in microscopic time intervals."
—Douglas Hofstadter

"[W]e think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past."
—Douglas Hofstadter

"When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind." —Oscar Wilde

"Il faut exiger de chacun ce que chacun peut donner."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Il faut bien que je supporte deux ou trois chenilles si je veux connaître les papillons."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"I believed because I wanted to believe."
—Lev Kopolev

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