"A good beginning makes a good end."

"Nobody should ever try to second-guess history, the facts are fantastic enough."

"To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain."

"Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees."

"A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat."

"Evil comes often to a man with money; tyranny comes surely to him without it. I say this, who am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a homeless wanderer upon the earth's far roads. I speak as one who has known hunger and feast, poverty and riches, the glory of the sword and the humility of the defenseless. Hunger inspires no talent, and carried too far, it deadens the faculties and destroys initiative..."

"I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief."

"It means little to anybody but us. We set store by kinfolk. We've our troubles from time to time, but when one of us is in danger, there'll be help from any who are around."

"Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more."

"Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you."

"The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers."

"I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I need nobody to make me somebody."

"This-this was what made life: a moment of quiet the water falling in the fountain the girl's voice ... a moment of captured beauty. He who is truly wise will never permit such moments to escape."

"The way I figure, no man has the right to be ignorant. In a country like this, ignorance is a crime. If a man is going to vote, if he's going to take part in his country and its government, then it's up to him to understand."

"For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time."

"Many a small man is considered good while he remains small, but let power come to him, and he becomes a raging fury."

"If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?"

"A man can lose sight of everything else when he's bent on revenge and it ain't worth it."

"Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen."

"Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost."

"Revenge could steal a man's life until there was nothing left but emptiness."

"Being scared can keep a man from getting killed and often makes a better fighter of him."

"Kill him? Would that be it? No man knew better than he the tricks that Destiny plays on a man, or how often the right man dies at the wrong time and place. A man never wore a gun without inviting trouble, he never stepped into a street and began the gunman's walk without the full knowledge that he might be a shade too slow, that some small thing might disturb him just long enough!"

"We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action."

"Men strive for peace but it is their enemies that give them strength and I think if man no longer had enemies he would have to invent them for his strength only grows from struggle."

"Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy."

"A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first."

"Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever."

"A man shares his days with hunger thirst and cold with the good times and the bad and the first part of being a man is to understand that."

"A man who says he has never been scared is either lying or else he's never been any place or done anything."

"It had been my father's way to remove obstructions, to repair washouts in old trails, to leave each trail better than he had found it. "Tread lightly on the paths," he had told me. "Others will come when you have gone."That was how I would remember my father. There was never a place he walked that was not the better for his having passed. For every tree he cut down he planted two."

"I've a regard for law, although I do not always agree with it. Without law, man becomes a beast."

"She'd never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it."

"She had believed the land was her enemy and she struggled against it but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it to belong to it to fit into its seasons and its ways."

"Pa he always said a man had to look spry for himself because nobody would do it for him your opportunities didn't come knocking around you had to hunt them down and hog-tie them."

"Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content."

"I fear there will be no future for those who do not change."

"The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture."

"Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment heredity and movements and changes in the world about him then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. ... Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today that I shall be tomorrow."

"Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king."

"Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that."

"I have been nothing ... but there is tomorrow."

"Any man can shoot a gun and with practice he can draw fast and shoot accurately but that makes no difference. What counts is how you stand up when somebody is shooting back at you."

"Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value."

"The one law that does not change is that everything changes and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring."

"A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it."

"I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label."

"Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him."

"I'm sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!""You will hate the next place, too," I said. "What you are you will carry with you."

"The wealthy and satisfied do not migrate, they stagnate."