In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.
Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
The silent killer of all great men and women of achievement - particularly men, I don't know why, maybe it's the testosterone - I think it's narcissism. Even more than hubris. And for women, too. Narcissism is the killer.
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.
Few great men would have got past personnel.
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.