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

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

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

Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

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

When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

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.