Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

It is not from reason that justice springs but goodness is born of wisdom.

Excellence then is a state concerned with choice lying in a mean relative to us this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

I have a crusade against fondant also shortening. There's no reason why wedding cakes can't taste good if you know what you're doing.

And we've got a toaster and everything. So there is no reason for the wedding.

Personally I'm an advocate for short engagements. Long sometimes means there is a reason for it. Two years engaged and no wedding... I'd be upset.

I will not attempt to deny the reasonableness and necessity of a party war but in carrying on that war all principles and rules of justice should not be departed from.

I feel like war should occur only for the most vital and necessary reasons and only then.

You should be careful what you wish for as the reasons for war get confused. One person can be very clear in their motives but others can have different agendas.

We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

I have a friend that is a WWII buff and we sat and talked a lot about stuff like the war and the reasons behind it and you now it's all in the uniform. Once you're in it it usually does all the work for you.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie but if you have plans for a war in Iraq and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.

And I'm a slow writer: five six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

We need to decide that we will not go to war whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media because war in our time is always indiscriminate a war against innocents a war against children.

War contains so much folly as well as wickedness that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.