I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.