There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note -- torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.

Henry Ward Beecher

It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand.

American Indian Proverb

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

George Orwell

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Roger Scruton

Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

Isaiah Berlin

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

Thomas Paine

Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.

Ron Paul

Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.

Bill Tilden

'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.

Harry Connick, Jr.