Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place.

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

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

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.