For mortals are never permitted to escape destiny, but its great net I spread all around them. Apollonius. Apollonius Rhodius,...

Patton commenting on being removed from command: My final thought on the matter is that I am destined to achieve some great thing—what I...

Menelaus, in the play of Sophocles, to give an image of his vicissitudes of estate, says— “For me, my destiny, alas, is found Whirling...

Brutus, being to pass his army from Abydos to the continent on the other side, laid himself down one night, as he used to do, in his...

Churchill on the advent of nuclear weapons:

By nightfall on 10 May 1940 Churchill was Prime Minister. He later wrote of how, when he went to bed that night, he was conscious ‘of a profound sense of relief. At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’

There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth. Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber. There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans specula

Custer prayed, “inwardly, devoutly,” as he had informed Libbie in a letter five days earlier. “Never have I failed to command myself to God’s keeping,” he wrote, “asking Him to forgive my past sins, and to watch over me while in danger . . . and to receive me if I fell . . . After having done so all anxiety for myself, here or hereafter, is dispelled. I feel that my destiny is in the hands of the Almighty. This belief, more than any other fact or reason, makes me brave and fe

Come, now, and let us review the points on which we have reached agreement. The unhampered man, who finds things ready to hand as he wants them, is free. But the man who can be hampered, or subjected to compulsion, or hindered, or thrown into something against his will, is a slave. And who is unhampered? The man who fixes his aim on nothing that is not his own. And what are the things which are not our own? All that are not under our control, either to have, or not to have, o