“Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”

Hotchkiss
1900s, Getting Married (1908)
Context: Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.

The Man in The Apollo of Bellac: A Play in One Act, p. 12 (1954, as adapted by Maurice Valency).

preface to 2015 edition of Secrets and Lies
Cryptography
Context: A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.

The Tangle Box

reported in Jonathan Wilson (Eurosport, 24 March 2016), Johan Cruyff's legacy? The whole of modern football http://www.eurosport.co.uk/football/johan-cruyff-s-legacy-the-whole-of-modern-football_sto5368491/story.shtml.

The Camelot Project interview (1996)
Context: When the legend is retold, it mirrors the reality of the time, and one can learn from studying how various authors have attempted to retell the story. I don't think we have an obligation to change it radically. I think that if we ever move too far from the basic story, we would lose something very precious. I don't, for instance, approve of fantasy that attempts to go back and rewrite the Middle Ages until it conforms to political correctness in the twentieth century. That removes all the benefit from reading the story. If you don't understand other people in their time and why they did what they did, then you don't understand your own past. And when you lose your past, you lose some potential for your own future.

Song lyrics, Ophelia (1998), Kind & Generous