Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.
The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide.
The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.
History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.
I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?
Rather an end in horror, than horror without end. He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later. The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot him all the same if we have to. The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,Does this improve me?, not look at the possible fringe benefits If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.
Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors.
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.
It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.