In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? — the cuckoo clock. – Graham Greene and Orson Wells, The Third Man

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible — and achieve it, generation after generation. – Pearl S. Buck