Quote collection
56 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence."
"Next to courage, willpower is the most important thing in politics."
"The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them."
"Courage is the essential element in any great public man or woman."
"I don't write huge books any more. I used to write 1,000 printed pages, but now I write short books. I did one on Napoleon, 50,000 words - enjoyed doing that. He was a baddie. I did one on Churchill, which was a bestseller in New York, I'm glad to say. 50,000 words. He was a goodie."
"John Major is what he is: a man from nowhere, going nowhere, heading for a well-merited obscurity as fast as his mediocre talents can carry him."
"I was very fond of Princess Diana. She used to have me over to lunch to ask my advice. I'd give her good advice, and she'd say: 'I entirely agree. Paul, you're so right.' Then she'd go and do the opposite."
"It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections"
"In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'."
"The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence."
"A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures."
"Hell is being trapped in a night-club with the'beautiful people'and forced to live in a'luxury penthouse flat'."
"If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped."
"There are no inevitabilities in history"
"The word 'meaningful' when used today is nearly always meaningless."
"Wisdom lies not in possessing knowledge - which quickly becomes outdated - but in perpetually seeking it."