Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

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.

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.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.