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.

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

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

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

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.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.