64 Quotes by John Keegan

It’s a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they’d fallen compared with the West.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can’t deal with except by force.

I can’t visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle – a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues.

Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they’re the people you have to kill, aren’t they?

I don’t look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don’t know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.