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"He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model."
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"Politicians look for interests not people."
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Personal Development

"When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force."
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Personal Development

"Experience is in the fingers and the head. The heart is inexperienced."
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Personal Development

"And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet."
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Personal Development

"I believe the term is 'eminent domain.'Ah, yes. That means 'theft by the government."
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Personal Development

"There is no single truth in a world ruled by many political parties."
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Personal Development

"Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties."
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Personal Development

"Democracy is good, but it is not good for an uneducated dogmatic society. Often, that society does not know how to choose wisely."
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Personal Development

"If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it."
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Personal Development

"Majority wins, but majority is not necessarily right and sometimes majority is awfully wrong."
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Personal Development
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"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
Power


"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
Humor


"Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried."
Feminism


"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
Observation


"Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do."
Perception


"Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel."
Fiction


"Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home."
Perspective


"Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad."
Family


"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."
Reading


"The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time."
Humor
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