A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: “Live for that better day.
Everything interested him and everything excited him.
Books are … companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.
Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all passions.
Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
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.
No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.
House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.
What other country has had the privilege of making the world’s heart beat faster?
Diplomacy’s primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.
The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.
The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn’t responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.
A minister’s (cabinet member’s) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.
Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors.
Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.
The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.
Connection” was the cement of the governing class.
Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.
If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.
He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.
How much does a man’s effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII
No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.
Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.
Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to “receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.
The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.
All this visible greatness was really one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.
Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions.
Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?
Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category.
Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.
The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed
Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher
No one is is sure of his premise as the man who knows too little.
If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.
When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. “That’s a curious view, not uninteresting.
Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.
The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.
Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham
Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.
In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.
Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.
One English nobleman and statesman read and reread a particular work of literature because it was “the only book which allowed him to forget politics.
Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain’s rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.
Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.
His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it.” Pope Alexander
The limitation prompting folly ” was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.
He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.
That he survived, and indeed returned to government, was one of man’s occasional triumphs over medicine.
England’s traditional tolerance was outraged at last.
His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.
Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.
A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.
These cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle
The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to.
Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: “Learn from socialism, but don’t join it.
He believed interim reforms were necessary in order to fix the worker for his destiny.
Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.
One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.
The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.
He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.
Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.
He was always the bridge, between men as well as between ideas.
Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.
Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.
As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin
Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.
Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.
The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country.
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution.
He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.