Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

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

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is...

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any...

Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.

These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle

Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.

The early removal from school of future officers of Britain’s seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking...

Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all passions.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to.

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in...