“These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale -”

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

“Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.”

“You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.”

“Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.”

“Then came a volley of colorful abuse, delivered in such an imperious voice, at at such a volume, that Terentia's distant ancestor, who had commanded the Roman line against Hannibal at Cannae a century and a half before, must surely have sat bolt upright in his tomb.”

“Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.”