William Shakespeare Quotes

In Afghanistan, life is so fragile; who knows what the next week will bring? That fragility really affects the way you're able to report, and the kind of stories people will tell you.

I've always wondered if, at some point, everything will snap, and it'll be like 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the delightfully mad people turn into sinister mad people.

Life is a free fall parachute jump. Pray all the way down and hope for a safe landing.

What goes up must come down. But don't expect it to come down where you can find it.

When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. ... Countless minor incidents - the kind you can never really foresee - combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

Businesses are terrified. They have no idea what I'm going to do next.

There various news I heard of love and strife,Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,The fall of favourites, projects of the great,Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.

feeling - probably for the first time in my life - the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what's going to happen or when.

Possibility is far more frightening than impossibility.

Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux.

It’s like in soccer: you have to deal with the penalties where they fall; you can’t choose where they’re going to land. Life is like that, and you have to deal with it even if you don’t like it.

An expectation was there, mixed in with so many other emotions - excitement, resignation, hesitation, confusion, fear - that would well up then wither on the vine. You're optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.

I didn't know whether to trust Alaska, and I'd certainly had enough of her unpredictability - cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.

I don't want to fall. All I want to do is stand on solid ground.

In my dream I know I am falling. But there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream. But when I open my mouth, nothing happens. And I wonder if you fall forever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever.

The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt.

The good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy.

Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.

It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

All things human hang by a slender thread; and that which seemed to stand strong suddenly falls and sinks in ruins.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.