"No one of real intelligence will accept anything just because some authority declares it be so. Don't accept the truth of anything you have not confirmed for yourself."
- Paul Hoffmann
"You're the right colour for the Angel of Death, Mister Cale. But a little short.' 'I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I'd be taller."
- Paul Hoffman
"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it as it is to its victims - the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is that nobody really possesses a great kind of power for long. Th..."
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air."
"I have a message for your daughter,” said Cale. “I am bound to her with cables that not even God can break. One day, if there is a soft breeze on her cheek, it may be my breath; one night, if the cool..."
"t was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there m..."
"It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul."
"...the older I get, the more I believe that if love is to be judged by most of its visible effects, it looks more like hatred than friendship."
"Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul."
"Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ (...)‘And?’‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason..."