“It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.”

“The secret is to know how to lie" he used to say, " and to know when someone's lying to you". His father, Steve eventually decided, must have known how to lie.”

“He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.”

“To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”

“It is horrible how people will use anything as a political monkey wrench and to hell with the country. (Julia Child to Avis DeVoto)”

“Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality, for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done will rather bring about his ruin than his preservation.”