I managed to weave my way in and around it, a maneuver one learns in the process of writing history—to muffle the facts a bit when one can’t understand everything—watch Gibbon do it in those sonorous...
Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.
He said that whatever the outcome in America, he would always regard it as a glory and honor to have upheld the cause which he regarded as that of all humankind.
German soldiers, posted as informers, were found dressed as peasants, even as peasant women. The latter were discovered, presumably in the course of non-military action, by their government issued und...
General Gallieni, dining in civilian clothes at a small café in Paris on August 9, overheard an editor of Le Temps at the next table say to a companion, I can tell you that General Gallieni has just e...
Fate represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.
Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others. Under
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in ti...
A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
Wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people, and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for lowness of blod or foulenesse of body...
The plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other...
Principle, formulated for the occasion, that a woman does not succeed to the throne of France. Thus was born the momentous Salic Law that was to create a permanent bar to the succession of women where...
Forces on taking sugar islands in the West Indies or besieging Gibraltar or collecting an assault force for the invasion of Britain, because the place to defeat the English was in America. Pleas from...
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office], he wrote to a friend, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
Whatever our lot may be, August 4, 1914, will remain for all eternity one of Germany’s greatest days!
To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear bli...
To Wilson neutrality was the opposite of isolationism. He wanted to keep out of war in order to play a larger, not a lesser, part in world affairs. He wanted the great permanent glory for himself as w...
They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out and touched it between the Aisne and the Marne.
Thereafter the red edges of war spread over another half of the world. Turkey’s neighbors, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, and Greece, were eventually drawn in. Thereafter, with her exit to the Mediterranea...
The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before...