84 Quotes by Max Hastings

All his life, the ruler of Russia displayed towards able comrades a blend of admiration and envy which impelled him to murder most of them sooner or later.

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time.

Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things, and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to destroy, and not so long ago there was no money or work, and it seems so wrong somehow, that money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.

Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews.

A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, “We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.

The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed.

The American and British armies in the Second World War paid a high price for the privilege of the profoundly anti-militaristic ethos of their nations.

France’s Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with an enhanced reputation: a marshal who had voluntarily dropped a rank to fight in Italy, Juin was far better fitted to direct operations than either Alexander or Clark.

After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some.