A civilised man is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat.
I don’t look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.
Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle – a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues.
The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they’d fallen compared with the West.
Slavery in the modern world implies the absolute deprivation of the individual’s liberty, while possession of weapons and mastery of their use are means to the individual’s liberation. We do not perceive how a man may be armed and at the same time bereft of his freedom.
The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.
The great Chinese classics have always said that it’s better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.
Nobody should teach anywhere for 25 years, but I did.
The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don’t know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.
If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they’re the people you have to kill, aren’t they?
Some people are more terrorist than others.
There are certain wicked people in the world that you can’t deal with except by force.
Even a pacifist should admire the military virtues.
Good men who exercise power are really the most fascinating of all people.
I don’t think that what’s going on in Bosnia is political activity. It’s partly political, but it’s partly atavistic as well.
I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.
It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War’s chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter.
Less than twenty years after the end of the Great War, the ‘war to end wars’ as it had come to be called at the nadir of hopes for its eventual conclusion, Europe was once again gripped by the fear of a new war, provoked by the actions and ambitions of war lords more aggressive than any known to the old world of the long nineteenth-century peace.
Plans made without allowance for the intentions of the enemy are liable to miscarry.
The Second World War, when it came in 1939, was unquestionably the outcome of the First, and in large measure its continuation. Its circumstances – the dissatisfaction of the German-speaking peoples with their standing among other nations – were the same, and so were its immediate causes, a dispute between a German-speaking ruler and a Slav neighbour.