- Ability is nothing without opportunity.
- A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
- A true man hates no one.
- Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.
- Courage isn’t having the strength to go on – it is going on when you don’t have strength.
- Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
- Great ambition is the passion of a great character.
- History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
- I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.
- If you build an army of 100 lions and their leader is a dog, in any fight, the lions will die like a dog. But if you build an army of 100 dogs and their leader is a lion, all dogs will fight like a lion.
- If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.
- If you want a thing said, ask a man; if you want a thing done, ask a woman.
- I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
- Imagination rules the world.
- In politics, an absurdity is not an impediment.
- In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.
- It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
- Men are moved by two levers: fear and self-interest.
- Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
- Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
- Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
- One must change one’s tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.
- Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.
- Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
- Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
- Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.
- The art of government is not to let me grow stale.
- The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemy’s.
- The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.
- The greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory.
- The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.
- The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.
- The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.
- The word impossible is not in my dictionary.
- There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the mind.
- There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
- Victory belongs to the most persevering.
