84 Quotes by Max Hastings

Diem regarded the Americans as ‘great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race’.

Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given.

All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret.

Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand.

Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy.

Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history.

Courage is essentially competitive and imitative.

At Arnhem, the British fielded too many gentlemen and not enough players.

The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity.