"The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony."

"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."

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

"For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in."

"Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors."

"Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed."

"Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions."

"The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to."

"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."

"Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come."

"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."

"He was always the bridge, between men as well as between ideas."

"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."

"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 single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society."

"Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did."

"To the anonymous reviewer of George F. Kennan's book, Russia Leaves the War, who wrote in the Times Literary Supplement (London), January 4, 1957, this sentence: "We still do not know at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful decision to bring the United States into the First World War," I would like to say hello."

"He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within."

"In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great."

"The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke."

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

"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."

"What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?"

"Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

"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."

"Folly is a child of power."

"The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise."

"One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral."

"Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis."

"He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him."

"If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident."

"To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution."

"If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture."

"A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit."

"Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly."

"A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done."

"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."

"Even his own speeches bored him."

"The scene is France. The theater is the world."

"Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present."

"Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own."

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

"Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions."

"Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls."

"Honor wears different coats to different eyes."

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

"They resented the patronage they depended upon."

"Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power."

"Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation."

"How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII."