To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

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.

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

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