Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people to discourage them from ambitious attempts and generally console them in their mediocrity.

Wise kings generally have wise counselors and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.

The day of the wedding went like these things generally do full of anxious moments interspersed with black comedy.

I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation probably. To win the war on terror you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense I regret to say basically this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

Politicians like generals have a tendency to fight the last war.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.

He was a degenerate gambler. That is a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I'll show you a loser show me a hero and I'll show you a corpse.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance the memory of it.

I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.

The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture the sociological aspects of our climbing culture our 'me' generation our yuppie culture our SUVs or you know shopping culture our war culture.

Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.

It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

As for charity it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned and the ultimate consequence to the general good are apt to be at complete war with one another.

In most communities it is illegal to cry 'fire' in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood isn't it?

The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

When I grew up in Taiwan the Korean War was seen as a good war where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was of course the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

It is the merit of a general to impart good news and to conceal the truth.