Matt

“The columnist George Will likes to quote a line that he says Cardinal Wolsey uttered about Henry VIII: “Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.”
― William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, [the general who concocted the attack plan] but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
― Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Even today, I would go halfway round the world to find a book if I thought it essential to my needs, and I have a feeling of absolute veneration for those few authors who have given me something special. For this reason, I can never understand the tepid youth of today who wait for books to be given to them and who neither search nor admire. I would go without eating in order to get a book, and I have never liked borrowing books, because I have always wanted them to be absolutely mine so that I could live with them for hours on end.

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.”
― Miguel Serrano, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships

“I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.”
― Evelyn Waugh