I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
On any occasion when one can discover the cause of events, one should not resort to the gods.
If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible.
Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics. . . For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.
The period of youth is the glory of nature, and the healthful development of all the resources of strength deposited in our nature is the glory of youth.
Heraldry has been contemptuously termed 'the science of fools with long memories. '
Anyway, my father became super-responsible. You know, he was the kind of person that absorbs all responsibility in the family, and then everybody else can act like a child in relation to him.
Putting love first means knowing that the universe supports you in creating the good, the holy, and the beautiful. It means knowing that you're on the earth for a purpose, and that the purpose itself will create opportunities for its accomplishment.