"The best thing for being sad, replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may miss your only love, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may see the whole world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you." from The once and future king.

"Very, very drunk."

"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men."

Wilde and Whistler were frequent sparring partners. One occasion, after Whistler had made a particularly scintillating remark, Wilde exclaimed "I wish I had said that!" "You will, Oscar, you will."

Cabling Whistler, Wilde mocked the inaccuracy of a reputed conversation between them which appeared in a newspaper. "When you and I are together, we never talk about anything except ourselves." Whistler immediately replied "When you and I are together we never talk about anything except me."

A snob asked Whistler what could have possessed him to have been born in Massachusetts. "I wished to be near my mother."

Asked if genius was hereditary, he couldn't say, replying "Heaven has granted me no offspring"

A well known bore tried to engage him in conversation "You know Mr. Whistler, I passed by your house last night-" "Thank you."

Annoyed by his constant self-applause, someone remarked pointedly "It's a good thing we can't see ourselves as others see us." "Isn't it?" agreed Whistler. "I know in my case I'd grow intolerably conceited."

Some blank canvasses he'd ordered went astray in the post. Asked if they were valuable. "Not yet, not yet."

He had wined and dined extremely well at a friend's house, so much so that he promptly fell down the stairs. He demanded the name of the architect. "I might have known it," he burped. The damned teetotaler."

 "Never offend anyone by accident." (columnist)

At Oxford, Wilde had to translate aloud from the original Greek, which he did fluently. Satisfied, his examiners tried to stop him. "Oh do let me go on," he implored. "I want to see how it ends."

A customs officer once asked him if he had anything to declare. "No. I have nothing to declare except my genius."

Asked his opinion of a truly awful play, he replied "The play was a great success - but the audience was a disaster."

The poet laureateship was vacant, and many names, bar that of the minor poet Morris, were mooted for it. "It's a complete conspiracy of silence against me," Morris complained. "what ought I do, Oscar?" "Join it," urged Wilde.

When someone suggested that he make certain alterations to one of his own plays, Wilde protested "Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece."

Wilde and Whistler enjoyed a long-running feud, based on Whistler's claim that Wilde had plagiarised his ideas on art. Wilde retorted, "The only original ideas I have ever heard him express refer to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself."

On his deathbed, impoverished in a Paris hotel: "I am dying beyond my means."

"I’m glad to hear you smoke. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is."

I bear no ill will against those responsible for this. That sort of talk will not bring her back to life. I shall pray for those people tonight and every night. I know there has to be a plan even though we might not understand it. God is good and we shall meet again. 8.11.87

Gordon Wilson on daughter Marie.

"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it."

"It must be a peace without victory … Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished … and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only peace between equals can last." addressing US Senate, 22.01.1917

 Woodrow Wilson

"The terms leadership and command are often used as interchangeably, which does disservice to the understanding of each concept. Command is a functional process and, therefore, unemotional, calculating and analytical. Leadership on the other hand, is a lot like love, because it deals with personal relationships, and these must be lived to be developed. Command is not an art or personal style, but a military science and process - a synergistic and cerebral application of equipment, tactics, weapons and men to achieve a defined military aim. Leadership, on the other hand, could be expressed as visibility and contact. A platoon commander is 95% leadership and 5% commander; he should really be called a platoon leader. A company commander is still highly visible and in direct man-contact, but he also has command tasks such as organizing fire support, cooperating with tanks, controlling logistics, reporting to higher headquarters, etc. Let's say he is 50% leader and 50% commander. A battalion commander has restricted opportunity for direct leadership of men, but he is certainly a visible authority. Let's say he is 20% leader and 80% commander. Above this level, leadership is less than 5%."

Major-General N.G. Wilson-Smith, PPCLI (paraphrased)

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"We soon came to the conclusion that a careful reading of the press could often produce results far superior to secret reports of agents, and that our own analysts should draw independent conclusions from diverse sources in order to evaluate raw intelligence material."

"For me, one who lived and worked behind the Wall after it was erected on August 13, 1961, and devoted my efforts to the security and advancement of the system that built it, the Wall was always an expression of strength and weakness. Only a system with our confidence in its founding ideology could have managed to divide a metropolis and draw a closed border between two parts of one country. And only a system as vulnerable and fundamentally flawed as ours was would have needed to do so in the first place."

"Intelligence is essentially a banal trade of sifting through huge amounts of random information in a search for a single enlightening gem or illuminating link, so I varied my routine by insisting on running ten or twelve agents personally."
 

"The problem with technical intelligence is that it is essentially information without evaluation. Technical intelligence can only record what has happened so far - not what might happen in the future. Human sources can give information about plans, can analyse the political and military outlook, and can place documents and conversations in context. As any intelligence officer knows, far too much of the job is spent sifting through mountains of data in search of a valuable nugget ... Even though the role of technical intelligence will increase and will supplement what used to be done by human means, it is the human factor that makes an espionage service successful, not its high-tech bells and whistles."