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.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

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

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.