“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the struggle that is life on Earth.

Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.

Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.

The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights protections. Anything less is unacceptable

In a campaign against more than one state or army, it is more fruitful to concentrate first against the weaker partner than to attempt the overthrow of the stronger in the belief that the latter’s defeat will automatically involve the collapse of the others.

To ensure attaining an objective, one should have alternate objectives. An attack that converges on one point should threaten, and be able to diverge against another. Only by this flexibility of aim can strategy be attuned to the uncertainty of war.

The implied threat of using nuclear weapons to curb guerrillas was as absurd as to talk of using a sledge hammer to ward off a swarm of mosquitoes.

The downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war.

I agree with Pres. Barack Obama, Iraqis need a political solution. No war in Iraq!

The military weapon is but one of the means that serve the purposes of war: one out of the assortment which grand strategy can employ.

For whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.