His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
actions
Suicidal glory is the luxury of the irresponsible. We're not giving up. We're waiting for a better opportunity to win.
giving glory luxury opportunity
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain
pain
Any community's arm of force military, police, security needs people in it who can do neccesary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
security
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
peace theend war
Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.
desire
I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow isthe higher achievement.
perfection
You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.
humility thepublic
I take it as a man's duty to restrain himself.
duty man
The dead cannot cry out for justice it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
duty
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.
children
Our children change uswhether they live or not.
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.
chance sleep
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.
honesty
What you are is a question only you can answer.
Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.
men
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
people
If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also
A good friend of my son's is a son to me.
Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear.
rights
If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.
If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.
door people
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.
If you can't do what you want, do what you can.