Quotes & Sayings About Pricks

Honour, the spur that pricks the princely mind,
To follow rule and climb the stately chair. — George Peele

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall. — Franz Kafka

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps. — Samuel Beckett

Everything satisfies precisely. Engorge sticky pricks. Enrage secret processes. Endure sexy pretense. Emerge surrounded parasitically. Energy sufficiently pulverized. Erection scoff prevention. Endorphin scream passage. Ecstatic speed patriarch. Embers slash plastic. Embalm severe parents. Epidemic seduction procedure. Escape seemed possible. Enormous secretion property. — Grace Krilanovich

When God forgives us for hitting Him with a club we should manage to put up with the pin pricks we get from our fellows. — Helmut Thielicke

President Obama called for a 'we' nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave. And that's what we need most in our country today. — Anna Deavere Smith

I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned. — Michel De Montaigne

Men are like roses. You have to watch out for the pricks. — Jill Shalvis

scripture is the voice of God speaking to us in our own human language. The Bible is an ocean in which we can immerse ourselves and never fully discover its riches. God's very life flows through it. As a nurse pricks a vein to draw blood, we can tap into this power for ourselves by faithfully praying with the scriptures each day. — Leo Zanchettin

Whatever your problems are, keep in mind that you die at the end of all this. Lets get out there, brutalize ourselves and laugh at those certain pricks who take it seriously, like there is any way to win in all this. — Doug Stanhope

Every rose has it's thorn, but that doesn't mean you have to put up with a ton of pricks. — Kelly Rossi

These are the most arrogant pricks in the world starting with Belichick on down. — Terrell Suggs

There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime. — Victor Hugo

Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe
his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction. — T.H. White

Placing his snout on the edge of my bed,
Boomer pricks up his ears and widens his smiling eyes
when I turn my head towards him.
I smile at Boomer.
"I guess you want to go for a walk?"
Boomer bobs his head in agreement
and runs around in a circle.

"Okay," I say.
I turn over,
throw off the blankets,
raise my upper body
and swing my legs around and over
the edge of the bed.
I sit on the edge of the bed
with my feet touching the floor
and my hands at my sides,
all holding me up as my upper body
leans over the edge.
I am still half asleep.

I look around to my right for Boomer,
but he is no where to be found.
Boomer went for his last walk
some thirty years ago. — Jeffrey A. White

The average man takes life as a trouble. He is in a chronic state of irritation at the whole performance. He does not learn to differentiate between troubles and difficulties, usually, until some real trouble bowls him over. He fusses about pin-pricks until a mule kicks him. Then he learns the difference. — Herbert Newton Casson

When faith touches your heart, you can walk on water.
When fear pricks your soul, you can sink on land.
With a great mind, you can achieve countless things.
With a strong heart, you can achieve extraordinary things.
With a loving soul, you can achieve impossible things. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The golden fleece of self-sufficiency guards against cudgel- blows but not against pin-pricks. — Friedrich Nietzsche

So, you wanna know what I want? I want it all. I want to be in love so much it hurts. The frissons. The pin pricks. The mind-blowing sex. The connection. And I want to be married with kids I adore and a husband who makes me feel safe, sexy, smart, secure, silly, serious, salacious, sinful, serene, satisfied. I want someone who makes me laugh until milk comes out of my nose (only I don't drink milk). I want to finish someone's sentences. I want to believe in someone, in something, in a future that's not just about laundry and soccer practice and subdivisions and minivans and guilt-tripping grandparents. I want to make someone a better person. I want to be a good example. I want to love some kids into the world. I want someone who stimulates my brain as much as my body. I want to taste everything and go everywhere. I want to give and I want to get. I want too much and I want it all in one person. — Bill Shapiro

Judging from the way they sat and goggled at the drag on the stage it was obvious that they were indulging in delightful fantasies that brought to them substantial memories of the girls they had left behind in London or Manchester. As the Quartermaster Captain lisped after performing before a particularly rapt audience: 'I bet there were more standing pricks than snotty noses tonight'. Astonishingly, I suspect he was right. We probably helped to keep the home fires of passion burning. — Eric Hiscock

There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity. — William James

For the success,
Although particular, shall give a scantling
Of good or bad unto the general;
And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large. — William Shakespeare

Even Pain pricks to livelier living. — Amy Lowell

[Admiral Nelson's counsel] guided me time and again. On the eve of the critical battle of Santa Cruz, in which the Japanese ships outnumbered ours more than two to one, I sent my task force commanders this dispatch: ATTACK REPEAT ATTACK. They did attack, heroically, and when the battle was done, the enemy turned away. All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble. Carry the battle to the enemy! Lay your ship alongside his! — William Halsey

I had a few pricks of conscience- seeing Henry's pajama bottoms hanging forlornly from a peg in our bedroom, his comb on he dresser, a stray white hair on his pillow- but real shame and regret were absent. In their place was a riotous sense of wonder. I'd never imagined myself capable of either great boldness or great passion, and the discovery that I had reservoirs of both astounded me. — Hillary Jordan

If you will take me as your teacher, you will not kick against the pricks. — Aeschylus

You can't gather much if you won't go on risk expedition. Leaders never fear the thorns; they'll still go in for the beautiful roses no matter the number of pricks they'll get. — Israelmore Ayivor

I won't let other pricks think they have a chance with you, because they fucking don't. — Adriane Leigh

Russia," Emilio would say, "is full of frozen, heartless pricks. If you wanna beat 'em, you gotta be able to tough it out in their kinda conditions. So basically, you gotta know how to not bust your ass on a shitload of ice while half frozen and drunk. — Santino Hassell

Divorced?'
'Separated.'
He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. 'Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don't want it.' ("Novelty") — John Crowley

Success in such a war as this comes only through men sewn to a single purpose, funnelled to a single spear thrust rather than a thousand needle-pricks. — Madeline Miller

No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it. — Ezra Pound

I was sorry to notice that my clumsiness with the safety-pin hurt her. Indeed, it might have been serious, for the skin of her throat was pierced. I must have pinched up a piece of loose skin and have transfixed it, for there are two little red points like pin-pricks, and on the band of her nightdress was a drop of blood. When I apologised and was concerned about it, she laughed and petted me, and said she did not even feel it. Fortunately it cannot leave a scar, as it is so tiny. — Bram Stoker

Do not let trifles disturb your tranquility of mind. The little pin-pricks of daily life when dwelt upon and magnified, may do great damage, but if ignored or dismissed from thought, will disappear from inanition. — Grenville Kleiser

It'll be an honour to serve you, sir," he added.
"In a French battalion?" Gudin teased him.
"If you don't flog, sir, and you don't carve up pricks, then it'll be more than an honour. — Bernard Cornwell

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president ... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it. — Erin McCarthy

These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control. — Michael Moore

All these pricks gathering around her body, trying to reach and pierce her rose. — Anthony Liccione

And she has a thousand virtues and not one acknowledged sin, But she is the sort of person you could liken to a pin. And she pricks you, and she sticks you, in a way that can't be said, When you seek for what has hurt you, why, you cannot find the head. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I shouldn't have lost my temper that way. It just pricks his pride, makes him dig in his heels."
"So why did you?" I asked, genuinely curious. It was rare for Nikolai's emotions to get the best of him.
"I don't know," he said, shredding the leaf. "You got angry. I got angry. The room was too damn hot."
"I don't think that's it."
"Indigestion?" he offered.
"It's because you actually care about what happens to this country," I said. "The throne is just a prize to Vasily, something he wants to squabble over like a favorite toy, You're not like that. You'll make a good king."
Nikolai froze. "I ... " For once, words seemed to have deserted him. Then a crooked, embarrassed smile crept across his face. It was a far cry from his usual self-assured grin. "Thank you," he said.
I sighed as we resumed our pace. "You're going to be insufferable now, aren't you?"
Nikolai laughed. "I'm already insufferable. — Leigh Bardugo

Kestrel saw a certain curiosity in the way they lingered. A waiting, a wondering.
"Deliah, what is it?"
"You haven't heard?"
"Heard what?"
Deliah fussed with the hem. "The Herrani representative has arrived."
"What?"
"He arrived this morning on horseback. He came through the pass in the nick of time."
"Take this dress off."
"But I'm not finished, my lady."
"Off."
"Just a few more--"
Kestrel tugged the fabric from her shoulders. She ignored Deliah's small cry, the pricks of pins, the thin chime of them scattering onto the stone floor. Kestrel stepped out of the dress, pulled on her day clothes, and rushed out the door. — Marie Rutkoski

Do not kick against the pricks. — Aeschylus

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks! — Gustave Flaubert

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works. — John Updike

There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it. — Chiwetel Ejiofor

The only thing dumber than a Democrat or a Republican is when those pricks work together. You see, in our two-party system, the Democrats are the party of no ideas and the Republicans are the party of bad ideas. It usually goes something like this. A Republican will stand up in Congress and say, 'I've got a really bad idea.' And a Democrat will immediately jump to his feet and declare, 'And I can make it sh*ttier.' — Lewis Black

Look at the mid- sky, about halfway up from the horizon, and wait for your eyes to adjust," I said softly. "It will take five to ten minutes."He was quiet. The sky was full of stars; and the spaces between them were not fully black, because the longer we stared, the more the pricks of other stars peeked behind and next to them. I stole that time to listen to him breathe. I soaked up his presence, storing it for the future, burning it into my memory. — Elizabeth Fama

Why is it always the self-righteous pricks who turn out to be complete perverts? You know it gives the rest of us a bad name. Own your perversion, dude. — Lexi Blake

Before I'd touch a square bitch's slit,
I'd suck a thousand clappy pricks and swim through liquid shit,
They got green puke between their rotten toes,
And snot runs from their funky nose,
I hope square bitches become syphilitic wrecks,
I hope they fall through their own assholes and break their motherfucking necks. — Iceberg Slim

Tough to part; lock, stock and barrel. Something remains, like recognizable tastes and smells, which kindle the faculty of memory, yea-pricks the soul. — Aporva Kala

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots. — Napoleon Bonaparte

A rose, isn't quite as beautiful as it once was, when after its thorn pricks you. — Anthony Liccione

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. — Daphne Du Maurier

American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us? — Peter Greenaway

In every man's life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure. — Robert Silverberg

Why sacrifice some for the benefit of others? It's generally the best and the bravest who choose to lay down their lives for the sake of those who hide in their holes. So why favor the sacrifice of the righteous in order to permit the less righteous to survive them? Don't you think that's a way of weakening the human species? What's going to be left of it in a few generations if it's always the best who are called upon to exit the scene so that the cowards, the counterfeits, the charlatans, and the pricks can continue to proliferate like rats? — Yasmina Khadra

It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Thank you, Will, Jem murmured as Tessa drew the stumbling girl away as quickly as she could, and Will felt the words as three needle pricks inside his heart. Always when Will did something to protect Tessa, Jem thought it was for his sake, not for Will's. Always Will wished Jem could be entirely right. Each needle prick had its own name. Guilt. Shame. Love. — Cassandra Clare

Nowadays most people kick with the pricks. — Theodor W. Adorno

I want to make love to you, Rhone. I want to fill your ass with my penis and fuck you until you love it just as much as I do. I want to suck your dick and eat your balls until your cum coats my tongue and throat. I want you to do the same to me. I want to come inside you, in your mouth, in your ass, on your chest, marking you as mine in a way you can feel even when I'm not by your side. That's what I want. It's what I've wanted ever since you told me I could have a different, better life and then took the time to care and to show me how to care about myself. I want everything you can give, and I want to offer you everything that I am. — Cameron Dane

I was begging you not to get married and if you do manage to talk some poor woman into marrying you, please pull out," Paul said in a slow, condescending manner, raising his eyebrows in hopes of clarifying. "Sterilization should be a legal requirement for pricks like you. — Kele Moon

But that don't mean I don't love America, by God, though I hate these damn hunters, all they wanta do is level a gun at a helpless sentient being and murder it, for every sentient being or living creature these actual pricks kill they will be reborn a thousand times to suffer the horrors of samsara and damn good for 'em too." "Hear, — Jack Kerouac

Good luck to progressive candidates in U.S. Senate elections against the usual rich, white, racist, women-hating pricks they run against. — Irvine Welsh

On the road leading from his ranch to Samantha's, Wyat t drove his surrey up a small hill and caught his breath as the beauty of the large crescent moon dangling just out of reach over the crest A full moon would have been plump with luminescence, yet the pearly surface of the sickle still cast enough light to shadow his surroundings and seemed close enough that once he drove to the top of the hill, he'd be able to touch the bottom horn or at least toss a rope around it. He slackened the reins, slowing the horse, knowing that the higher he climbed, the sooner the illusion of closeness would disappear and he wanted to preserve for a moment the fantasy that the moon was within his grasp.
The stars, by contrast, were distant pricks of diamond light farther out than a man could dream. He sighed. Life as a rancher or as a rancher's wife was not moon and stars easy or romantic. What would put stars in Samantha's eyes? — Debra Holland

Those pricks down the hall, flying high above it all on this hillside, they're the kind of people whose faces end up on money or a new library so that kids will have a new place to hang out while realizing that no one ever taught them how to read. Their wealth doesn't insulate them from the world. It creates it. Their bank statements read like Genesis. Let there be light and let a thousand investment banks bloom. They shit cancer, and when they belch in a bowl valley like L.A., the air turns so thick and poisonous that you can cut it up like bread and serve it for lunch at McDonald's. A Suicide Sandwich Happy Meal. — Richard Kadrey

I see the pricks of blood the spear has left in his shoulder, and when Mutt slides the door shut, I spring on to Mutt and press my little switchblade to his great bulging neck. I can see his skin sucking in with his pulse. My knife lies right next to it. "I thought you said to beat you on the sand," Mutt says. corr slams the wall of his stall with his hooves. My voice hisses out through a cage of my teeth. "I also said ten drops of your blood for every drop of his." I want a pool of his blood around him like the one beneath Edana. I want him to lie against this wall and whimper like she does.I want him to know he'll never stand again. I want him to remember David Prince's death mask as he wears it for himself. — Maggie Stiefvater

The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned pricks more deeply and draws more blood. — Maya Angelou

Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. — William Shakespeare

Her green eyes flutter all the way open, and she looks amused. It pricks his ego slightly. After that kiss, shouldn't she be fainting at his feet? But she's grinning. — Cassandra Clare

I am penitent," says Vohannes. "I am penitent for all the relationships this shame has ruined. I am penitent that I've allowed my shame and unhappiness to spread to others. I've fucked men and I've fucked women, Father Kolkan. I have sucked numerous pricks, and I have had my prick sucked my numerous people. I have fucked and been fucked. And it was lovely, really lovely. I had an excellent time doing it, and I would gladly do it again. I really would." He laughs. "I have been lucky enough to find and meet and come to hold beautiful people in my arms - honestly, some beautiful, lovely, brilliant people - and I am filled with regret that my awful self-hate drove them away. — Robert Jackson Bennett

The Royal boys are not what I expected. They don't look like rich pricks in preppy clothes. They look like terrifying thugs who can snap me like a twig. — Erin Watt

It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors") — Richard Matheson

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One Friday afternoon at the close of the working day the idiot bosses in their fucking ties and suit coats came down and handed out pink slips to every other person on the floor. I got one. They were firing us. Then they turned and, without a word, went back to their offices. Corporate pricks. — John William Tuohy

With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just then-ah yes-I feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head. — Jennifer Egan

You can be a cocky asshole to me. I deal with little pricks like you all of the time. But you leave Jenn the hell alone or the next time you take a piss, it will be through a fucking tube. Do we understand each other? — Teresa Mummert

The stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another. — Storm Jameson

If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act. — Glenda Jackson

I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside. — Mo Udall

I can't bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It's even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either, and his hear burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows even what to make of him, that's the thing! What's shame for the mind is beauty all over for the heart. Can there be beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that's just where beauty lies
did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart. But, anyway, why kick against the pricks? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I've dealt with a lot of producers who were pricks and I'm determined not to be that. — Clive Barker

The pressure in the airlock grew, and the folds of her suit found every raised scar across her body, wrinkles pressing where wrinkles had once burned. It was a million pricks from a million gentle needles, every sensitive part of her touched all at once, as if this airlock remembered, as if it knew her. A lover's apology. — Hugh Howey

I am not talking to anyone in the British media - they are all pricks. — Allan Border

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks — Johnny Cash

As a director, you have a thousand things going on in your head, and of course, that's going to be difficult. That's going to mean that some things get overlooked. And so, for us as performers, being the selfish pricks that we are, we're sitting there being concerned about ourselves all the time and our character's through-line. — Jamie Campbell Bower

You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. [ ... ] So what you do is you let them coax you. You bake the cake and paint the wall and smile; you buy a new freezer as if you now had a plan for the future. And secretly
in the early morning
you sew a pocket in your skin. At the hollow of your throat. So that every time you smile, or nod your head at a teacher meeting, or bend over to pick up a fallen spoon, it presses and pricks and stings and you know you've not moved on. You never even planned to. — Andrew Sean Greer

BOYET
A mark! O, mark but that mark! A mark, says my lady!
Let the mark have a prick in't, to mete at, if it may be.
MARIA
Wide o' the bow hand! i' faith, your hand is out.
COSTARD
Indeed, a' must shoot nearer, or he'll ne'er hit the clout.
BOYET
An if my hand be out, then belike your hand is in.
COSTARD
Then will she get the upshoot by cleaving the pin.
MARIA
Come, come, you talk greasily; your lips grow foul.
COSTARD
She's too hard for you at pricks, sir: challenge her to bowl.
BOYET
I fear too much rubbing. Good night, my good owl.
Exeunt BOYET and MARIA — William Shakespeare

Speaking of names, a word to parents: Stop using alternate spellings for your kids. Aimee, Eryn, Bil, Derik. You're only costing jobs. The whole customized-coffee-mug and key-chain industry. An entire generation is being robbed of their roadside-Florida-souvenir heritage. "Daddy, why don't they ever have my name? I see something close, but it's spelled different." "Sorry, honey, we decided to be pricks. — Tim Dorsey

America was based on a big promise
a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem
particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America
you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks. — Robert Penn Warren

Men aren't called pricks, but women are called cunts. — Gerald Stern

Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The strategy of Fabius was not merely an evasion of battle to gain time, but calculated for its effect on the morale of the enemy-and, still more, for its effect on their potential allies. It was thus primarily a matter of war-policy, or grand strategy. Fabius recognized Hannibal's military superiority too well to risk a military decision. While seeking to avoid this, he aimed by military pin-pricks to wear down the invaders' endurance and, coincidentally, prevent their strength being recruited from the Italian cities or their Carthaginian base. The key condition of the strategy by which this grand strategy was carried out was that the Roman army should keep always to the hills, so as to nullify Hannibal's decisive superiority in cavalry. Thus this phase became a duel between the Hannibalic and the Fabian forms of the indirect approach. — B.H. Liddell Hart