Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

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

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.