Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Human behavior is timeless.
Books are humanity in print.
Completeness is rare in history.
Above all, discard the irrelevant.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
In the midst of events there is no perspective.
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced
Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.
satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.
The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Books are the carriers of civilization... Books are humanity in print.
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.
When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined.
The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
To be right and overruled is not forgiven to persons in responsible positions.
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.
Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.
in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.