The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.

The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.

I shouldn't have sat on death row 30 years. All they had to do was test the gun. But when you think you are high and mighty and you're above the law, you don't have to answer to nobody, but I've got news for you.