"America shall not lag a century behind Europe: it will stride as an equal first, and lead later; it will, in the end, be the most illuminated by the sciences just as it is most illuminated by the sun."

"But to reach...the pinnacle of power, it will be necessary, to climb rugged heights."

"Law. Law. That is what saves nations from the most imminent dangers."

"How can one govern without taxes, without strength, without authority?"

"Politically, America is the same as it is physically: the land of the earthquakes."

"Do not despair For Johnny-head-in-air; He sleeps as sound As Johnny underground."

"A lad changed to a shrub in spring, the shrub into a shepherd boy, A fine hair to a lyre string, snow into snow on hair piled high."

"If you truly want to learn a place, eat the food of its people."

"My four Southern food groups are bourbon, salt, bacon and pie."

"In the South, you will get a lot of sugar — and by that we mean a lot of hugs and kisses. We don't air kiss in the South."

"Bacon makes almost any meal tolerable."

"I wish you all full plates, glasses, tables, and hearts."

"I don't care whether the glass is half full or half empty as long as there's bacon on the plate."

"This isn't a diet book. In fact, you may gain 30 pounds just reading it."

"If there's no bacon in heaven, I don't plan on going."

"I may be the only man in America who can qualify for workers' comp based on my cholesterol."

"All my life my mother has told me I'm hard to shop for. She can't find the bacon aisle!"

"The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier."

"I went on a bourbon diet for three days and lost a week."

"Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"Another round? It would be rude not to."

"It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant."

"A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas."

"Abstaining from bourbon and bacon doesn't make you live longer. It just feels that way."

"The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old."

"These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events."

"One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen."

"The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years."

"The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well."

"Foreign policy deals across time as well as space."

"Bacon tastes better than skinny feels."