Sometimes it seems the onlyaccomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

-Drabble, Margaret
  A Summer Birdcage, ch.1.

You haveto take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war† The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessaryart. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.

-Dulles,John Foster
  Quoted in'How Dulles  Averted War', in Life magazine, 16  Jan. His biographer Peter Grose in Gentleman Spy (1994) claims Dulles'never actually used the word 'brinkmanship', but the label stuck to him as the legacy of a diplomatic strategy that was reckless for the nuclear age'.

You lost yourability for doing things in childhood† It all beganwithyourinability toputonyoursocksand ended by your inability to live.

-Goncharov, Ivan Alexandrovich
  Oblomov, pt.4, ch.2 (translated by David Magarshak).

   The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.

-Kraus, Karl
Aphorism collected in Heinrich Fischer (ed) Beim Wort genommen (1955). Translated by Harry Zohn in Half-truths and one-and-a-half truths (1986).

Nothing is so conducive to greatness of mind as the ability to examine systematically and honestly everything that meets us in life.

-Antoninus
Meditations, vol.3, pt.2 (translated by Charles Reginald Haines, 1901).

Only in a higher phase of communist society†can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety, and society inscribe on its banners,'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!' See Bakunin 53:25.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  Critique of the Gotha Programme, May.

In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. Theyare generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well those that theyalready have.

-More, SirThomas
  Utopia (English translation1556), bk.1.

Asthe strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.

-Poe, EdgarAllan
  Of detective work.'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', in the Gentleman's Magazine, Apr.

Weare not going after Saddam Hussein.If I caneliminate his ability to communicate with his forces, I would be entirely satisfied with that result.

-Schwarzkopf, H Norman
  Press briefing on the start of the Gulf War,15 Jan.

Martyrdom†the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  The Devil's Disciple, act 3.

   The greatest asset that a head of state can have is the ability to get a good night's sleep.

-Wilson of Rievaulx, (James) Harold Wilson, Baron
  BBC Radio 4 broadcast,16 Apr.