William Manchester Quotes

Oceanography, meteorology, and upper-atmosphere physics,

It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire i...

If Peking wasn’t stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as the military colossus of the East. U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world’s new nations would gravitate towa...

The Jap, as MacArthur called the enemy—nearly everyone else called Japanese Nips, short for Dai Nippon, the

Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Then, after calling

Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.

Later he would say that writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is th...

It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles the only bull who brings his own china shop with him, and who coined the progression, dull, duller, Dulles.

And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously re-worded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The Prime Minister scrawled across the page, This is nonsense up with which I wi...

I like to live in the past. I don't think people are going to get much fun in the future

Have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim.

In the nineteenth century, he observed, Jules Verne wrote Round the World in Eighty Days. It seemed a prodigy. Now you can get around it in four, but you do not see much of it on the way.