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Practice is a talent. Perseverance is a talent. Hard work is a talent.
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Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.
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I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me...
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I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination. I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.
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I am not concerned that you have fallen -- I am concerned that you arise.
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Adversity introduces a man to himself.
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We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.
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The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?
