"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) [the guy who also said "the pen is mightier than the sword" and started a novel "It was a dark and stormy night"]
 

"With God dead, there remains only history and power."

“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

"If he’s mad, I hope he’ll bite some of my other generals."

King George II responding to criticism of General James Wolfe, quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 12, 2012

"The truth is that I care more for my dog, donkey, and garden in the little English village where we live than for all the publicity in the world."

Frances Chesterton (GKC's wife), "to an American reporter during one of G.K.’s lecture tours”, quoted by Therese Warmus in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)

In my latest National Post column I warn that the largest lesson of the Christine Blasey Ford-Brett Kavanaugh confrontation could easily be seen as: Avoid the opposite sex entirely.

“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”

W. Warde Fowler, Rome.