To do Evil, that Good may come of it, is for Bunglers in Politicks, as well as Morals. - Charles William Eliot

Believe me, my friends, it is with talents as with virtue; one must love them for their own sake, or entirely renounce them. And neither of them is acknowledged and rewarded, except when their possessor can practise them unseen, like a dangerous secret.

Yet such persons are, without us, what the ideal of perfection is within us: models not for being imitated, but for being aimed at.

The great wars of the Roman Republic against the Greek monarchies were huge treasure-seeking and slave-driving enterprises that reduced to servitude the most able and most refined part of the population of the conquered countries.