All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare

What matter is not to add years to your life but to add life to your years.

Theultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but hold hands.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily basedon mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts ofjustice and police.

Undernormal conditions, most people tend to see what they want to see, hear what theywant to hear, and do what they want to do; in conflicts, their positionsbecome even more rigid and fixed.

The possession of power over others in inherently destructiveboth to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised.

Twobirds disputed about a kernel, when a third swooped down and carried it off.

Compromise,n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary thesatisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and isdeprived of nothing except what was justly his due.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establisha dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolutionin order to establish the dictatorship.

A danger forseen is half avoided.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands ofinteractions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, allthe more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyonehas a small part of himself in both.

Neverforget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes onand on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.