When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.
There is no record what Asquith replied or what, in his inmost mind, a region difficult to penetrate under the best of circumstances, he thought on this crucial question.
The reckoning of time was based on the movements of sun and stars, nature’s timekeepers, which were familar and carefully observed.
So lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient.
In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God.
In dust, heat, and discouragement and fatigue beyond telling, the British retreat continued. Trailing through St. Quentin, the tired remnants of two battalions gave up, piled up their arms in the rail...
In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies.
If it was not intended as a veto, then it must have been intended for commanders to interpret as they saw fit, which brings the matter to that melting point of warfare—the temperament of the individua...
If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit.
I need no Chief, said the Kaiser; I can do this for myself.
I command, or I keep quiet. Napoleon
Hubert Humphrey advised new members, If you feel an urge to stand up and make a speech attacking Vietnamese policy, don’t make it.
He must present Belgium as the cause without hiding France as the basic cause; he must appeal to Britain’s honor while making it clear that Britain’s interest was the deciding factor; he must stand wh...
Charles’s old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles V to support Clement, preferred to maintain neutrality, saying th...
But with that burst of the fairness that he can never repress, he admits that conversion is unlikely as long as Christians exclude Jews from the community: There must be first conversing with them bef...
Anything that protracted a campaign Clausewitz condemned. Gradual reduction of the enemy, or a war of attrition, he feared like the pit of hell.
After a last attempted poisoning—this time of Burgundy and Berry—Navarre died in horrid circumstances. Sick and prematurely old at 56, he was tormented by chills and shivering and at doctor’s orders w...
According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions.
The blood libel took possession of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too had originated in the 12th century.