A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.

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

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

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.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.