Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.

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.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Rome had Caesar, a man of remarkable governing talents, although it must be said that a ruler who arouses opponents to resort to assassination is probably not as smart as he ought to be.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Books are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive...

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

A relentless talent for tactlessness.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Books are humanity in print.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see, and arouse the...

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.