No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.
~ Barbara W. Tuchman
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.
The scene is France. The theater is the world.
Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.
Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.
All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.
Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions.
Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?
Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.
Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.
Everything took on the color of blood.
The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed
Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher
No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.
If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.
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.
Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.
The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.
He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.
Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham
Folly is a child of power.
Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.
In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.
Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.
One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was the only book which allowed him to forget politics.
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.
Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.
His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it. Pope Alexander
The limitation prompting folly was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.
He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.
That he survived, and indeed returned to government, was one of man's occasional triumphs over medicine.
England's traditional tolerance was outraged at last.
His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.
A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.
These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle
The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to.
