Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles.
Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself— a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant—...
The Pope replied, What can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, puffed up, pompous and sumptuous in luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that...
Whatever our lot may be, August 4, 1914, will remain for all eternity one of Germany’s greatest days!
The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.
The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.
The Germans were obsessively concerned about violations of international law. They succeeded in overlooking the violation created by their presence in Belgium in favor of the violation committed, as t...
The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes me...
That was the Battle of Mons. As the opening British engagement of what was to become the Great War, it became endowed in retrospect with every quality of greatness and was given a place in the British...
THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estima...
SO GORGEOUS WAS THE SPECTACLE on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of...
On August 27 Richard Harding Davis, star of the American correspondents who were then in Belgium, made his way to Louvain by troop train. He was kept locked in the railroad car by the Germans, but the...
No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.
Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. In...
It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.
Individual admirals and captains made their fortunes from their share of prize money, which was divided according to prize law of an extreme complexity that testified to its importance in the system....
In the annual Feast of Fools at Christmastime, every rite and article of the Church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferio...
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! lamented Samuel Coleridge. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern whic...
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.