As my friends know well, I’m a passionate person. Fortunately, though, I have a wide practical streak that helps me hold my passions in check and keeps me from cutting off my nose to spite my face. That practicality is a gift from both parents, but it usually speaks to me in the voice of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, quoting a favorite line from the film The Wrath of Khan: “You must learn to govern your passions; they will be your undoing.“

As a reporter for the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein occasionally let passion get the best of him, too. According to author Stephen Bates in his book If No News, Send Rumors, Bernstein dreamed of being the paper’s full-time rock critic. And executive editor Ben Bradlee promised him the job … before giving it to someone else.

Furious, Bernstein decided to quit the job he’d held since 1966. But his inner Spock must have had a word because he didn’t just storm out the door. Instead he quietly applied for Hunter S. Thompson’s recently vacated postion as political writer for Rolling Stone.

It was June 1972, a presidential election year. And while he waited to hear from Rolling Stone, Bernstein was assigned to cover a routine break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel.

Bernstein never made it to Rolling Stone and never became a rock critic. Instead he wound up partnered with reporter Bob Woodward, leading the national coverage of the Watergate Scandal. It was Bernstein who uncovered a key piece of evidence connecting President Nixon to the scandal, which led to the president’s resignation in 1974. If he’d stormed out of the Post in a huff, he’d have lost his role in the story of a generation, two best-selling books—All the President’s Men and The Final Days—and an Oscar-nominated film.

Here are a few more thoughts on governing your passions:

“Act nothing in a furious passion. It’s putting to sea in a storm.”

—Thomas Fuller, clergyman, author

“Control your passion or it will control you.”

—Horace, Italian poet

“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”

—Benjamin Franklin, scientist, publisher, statesman

“He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.”

—Samuel Johnson, author

“Passion costs me too much to bestow it on every trifle.”

—Thomas Adams, statesman

“The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one—through their excess.”

—Christian Nevell Bovee, author and lawyer

“Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.”

—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist

“It is the passions that do and undo everything.”

—Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle, scientist, author