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 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.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.

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

Completeness is rare in history.