“A system founded on the assumption that the only successful lives are the visibly brilliant ones is bound to define the bulk of the population as unsuccessful.”

Charles Murray In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

“The question of the existence of God is the single most important question we face about the nature of reality…. Neither question [does the concept of a personal God make sense and should we believe in one] is easy to answer. God is a different kind of being from any other that we might speak about.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist.

“the redoubtable Vice-Admiral Gilbert Stevenson, Royal Navy…. was a daunting sight, smothered in gold lace and brass buttons, with a piercing blue eye that could open an oyster at thirty paces…”

James Lamb The Corvette Navy (Stevenson was responsible for his initial training)

“Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate – or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea.”

Joseph Conrad Typhoon

“History is a vast early warning system."

Norman Cousins (ironically a world peace advocate)

“But what is this will to power? It would be a mistake to think of it as a drive to secure some stable state of power, in which we would then squat contentedly. In this universe of flux and endless becoming there is nothing static. To be in a position of power is continuously to exercise power. Power itself is the discharge of power. Power, then, is the will to power in act, willing itself toward further power, and so on endlessly. The will to power is a will to will. It wills itself endlessly in a void from which the very notion of ‘the true world’ – of which earlier philosophers dreamed – is denied it, and which it in turn defiantly denies.”

William Barrett The Illusion of Technique

“The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.”

Vaclav Havel

“A very wise man once said to me that in this life you could often get success, if you didn’t want victory.”

The character Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan’s novel The Three Hostages.