"Thrift of time will repay you in afterlife with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning."

"Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time."

"Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it."

"The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather 'opens things up to the light of Heaven' by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to 'illumine,' for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over."

"What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river."

"Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow."