“Foreign policy often involved nothing more than the decision whom to make war upon.”

“The way to a landowner's heart was to tax gently.”

“The cornerstone of the Roman legionnaires' astonishing fighting spirit can be attributed to their training.”

“The factor that made him so powerful was also his greatest liability.”

“With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates "tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes.”

“Author describes one monarch's impressive table but conveys a contemporary's observation, "the weightiest thing at dinner was the conversation".”

“God can use the jawbone of an ass!”

“Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. ...”

“Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”