“Truly great people in history never wanted to be great for themselves. All they wanted was the chance to do good for others and be close to God.”

“Really it comes down to your philosophy. Do you want to play it safe and be good or do you want to take a chance and be great?”

“What do you think people want, if it's not greatness and to be remembered for all time?""Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.”

“Why do these people crave fame? Why do any of us? Well, I’d argue it’s not about money. If it were our tabloids would be devoted to the lives and times of bankers. I think we all want to leave a legacy. We want to be remembered. We want to be Great.... In short, Alexander [the Great] was Great because others decided he was Great, because they chose to admire and emulate him. ... We made Alexander Great, just as today we make people great when we admire them and try to emulate them. History has traditionally been in the business of finding and celebrating great men, and only occasionally great women, but this obsession with Greatness is troubling to me. It wrongly implies, first, history is made primarily by men and secondly, that history is made primarily by celebrated people, which of course makes us all want to be celebrities. Thankfully we’ve left behind the idea that the best way to become an icon is to butcher people and conquer a lot of land, but the ideals that we’ve embraced instead aren’t necessarily worth celebrating either. All of which is to say we decide what to worship and what to care about and what to pay attention to. We decide whether to care about [so-called ‘celebrities’]. Alexander couldn’t make history in a vacuum, and neither can anyone else.”

“All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”

“I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years…”