“Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“England's traditional tolerance was outraged at last.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.”
Source: The First Salute : View of the American Revolution
“They resented the patronage they depended upon.”
“Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. "That's a curious view, not uninteresting.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Folly is a child of power.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.”
“Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.”
“He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it." Pope Alexander”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“When a pope's election could not be explained rationally, it was attributed to the Holy Ghost.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Pessimism is a primary source of passivity,”
Source: The First Salute : View of the American Revolution
“Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: "Learn from socialism, but don't join it.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“In a dependent relationship, the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.”
Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
“Little attention was paid, because the German people, no matter how hungry, remained obedient.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Two years later the logic of the struggle led (Pope) John XXII to excommunicate William of Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as “the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called “nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.”
Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
“Everything took on the color of blood.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“He believed that rank without power was a sham.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.”
Source: The Zimmermann Telegram
“The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“The fact-finding mission was now the traditional Washington substitute for policy.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.”
Source: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
“Connection" was the cement of the governing class.”
Source: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
“Besides, life was not precious, for what was the body after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth but a halt on the way to eternal life?”
Source: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
“William III died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not.”
Source: The First Salute : View of the American Revolution
“Holstein was a Machiavelli without a policy who operated on only one principle: suspect everyone. Bülow had no principles; he was so slippery, lamented his colleague Admiral Tirpitz, that compared to him an eel was a leech. The flashing, inconstant, always freshly inspired Kaiser had a different goal every hour, and practiced diplomacy as an exercise in perpetual motion.”
Source: The Guns of August