You never escape the traps you spin yourself. Only a greater power can — Robert Jordan

"Prophecy is most dangerous when you try to make it happen... The Pattern weaves itself around you, but when you try to weave it, even you cannot hold it."

"We are all fools sometimes, child, yet a wise woman learns to limit how often."

"When you leap from a cliff, it is too late for anything but holding to your courage. And hoping theres a haywain at the bottom to land in."

"Men! When you cannot win an argument, you either run away or resort to force."

"An arrow may not be a shocklance, yet it can still kill you."

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"

"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."

"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."