Any man who is truly worthy must consider himself unworthy.
Power depended on being in the room when the decisions were taken.
All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.
Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.
What starts as gratitude quickly becomes dependency and ends as entitlement.
Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.
No one who ever follows their conscience ever does wrong. The consequences may not turn out as we intended; it may prove that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong.
You were too young to fight in the last war, and I was too old. In some ways that made it worse.
And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it. “Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens’ militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?
The fact is, as the proverb says, before you can cook your rabbit you first have to catch it.
I am not a pacifist. The main lesson I have learned in my dealings with Hitler is that one simply can’t play poker with a gangster if one has no cards in one’s hand.
In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls.
This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in – and for what?
It seemed to me at the time – and still does now, only even more so – an act of madness for a man to pursue power when he could be sitting in the sunshine and reading a book.
So,” said Ruth, “how bad is it?” “You haven’t read it?” “Not all of it.” “Well,” I said, politely, “it needs some work.” “How much?” The words “Hiroshima” and “nineteen forty-five” floated briefly into my mind. “It’s fixable,” I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.
You cant build on a mass grave. Human beings are better than that – we have to be better than that – I do believe, don’t you?” Charlie McGuire, Fatherland.
But popularity and power, as he well knew, are separate entities. Often the most powerful men in a state can pass down a street unrecognised, while the most famous bask in feted impotence.
In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.
There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.
An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.