The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.

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.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.

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.