Decades, if not centuries are ...

Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse.
Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse.
 Jeane Kirkpatrick

More phrases

Who sows virtue reaps honor.
He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
The fixed determination to have acquired the warrior soul, to either conquer or perish with honor, is the secret of victory.
 George S. Patton
We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
 Steven Pressfield
See first with your mind, then with your eyes, and finally with your body.
 Yagyu Munenori

Quotes from the same author

The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.
 Jeane Kirkpatrick
For all their faults, right-wing authoritarian regimes more easily accept democratic reforms than left-wing totalitarian states.
 Jeane Kirkpatrick
Solidarity was the movement that turned the direction of history, I think.
 Jeane Kirkpatrick
When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it could shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.
 Jeane Kirkpatrick
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
 Jeane Kirkpatrick