Madeline

“Listen, you are no longer a boy. You are forty. When will you learn not to wait for chance but to build on what you have and use each day to consolidate your position? Why have you never been anything more than Tribune? Because your plans always begin with next month.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March

“They had been brought up to think that the domestic virtues were self-evident and universal; they had been starved of the knowledge that most attracts the young mind: that the crown of life is the exercise of choice”
― Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March

“Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse”
― Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March

“Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity”
― Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March