“In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.”

“Five years with the dowager - Good God, she ought to be given a title in her own right as a penance for such as that. No one had done more for England.”

“Attempt something so big, that unless God intervenes, it's bound to fail.”

“Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.”

“Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn't there? What does the Way rely upon, that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, that we have right and wrong? How can the Way go away and not exist? How can words exist and not be acceptable? When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words reply on vain show, then we have rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Mo-ists. What one calls right the other calls wrong; what one calls wrong the other calls right. But if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best to use is clarity.”

“We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.”