When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.