“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.”

“Edward Seymour says, ‘You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.’‘Edward,’ he says, ‘I should have been Pope.”

“Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them.”

“But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine.”

“When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”

“Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.”

“When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, "No, you don't, I agree, it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on."-Richard (?) nee Cromwell to Thomas Cromwell,358”