Messieurs, nous avons un maître, ce jeune homme fait tout, peut tout, et veut tout.
Speaking of Napoleon I of France, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), "Character", p. 105.
Messieurs, nous avons un maître, ce jeune homme fait tout, peut tout, et veut tout.
About
“Not being able to do everything is no excuse for not doing everything you can.”
“A Man who is Master of Patience, is Master of everything else.”
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections
“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.”
Speech during the commemorations of D-Day, 06/06/2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10883074/D-Day-anniversary-Queen-stirred-by-commemorations.html
2000s, 2003, Weekly radio address (March 2003)
“Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.”
“You have to try, you have to do everything you can.”
Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 76
The quantity of anthropological data discovered by scientists now exceeds any individual’s ability to assimilate it. The division of labor, including intellectual labor, begun thirty thousand years ago in the Paleolithic, has become an irreversible phenomenon, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power.
One Human Minute (1986)
