You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

If you cry “Forward!” you must make altogether plain in what direction to go. Can’t you see that if you don’t, when you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in diametrically opposite directions?

People must never be humiliated—that is the chief thing.

Man is what he believes.

Any idiot can handle a crisis—it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.

—Anton Chekhov

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

—Alan Bennett, Writing Home, 1994