“Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.”

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”

“One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.”

“Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.”

“It was a look that gave her a tingle, all right, but not in a good way. In that look she saw her silly bloody hopes as twisted and broken as shed left that Lowlanders arm, and it was no ones fault ...”

“A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.”

“Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.”

“So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, a...”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”

“This was about more than semantics; it represented a dangerous shift in perspective.Rio was not at war, I pointed out; and even if it were, wars have rules.”

“Rules are for people with the luxury of time.”

“Rules are for those who can't think of a better way.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”