If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

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

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.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.