Bevan Lewis > Bevan Lewis's Quotes

“In January 1981, the mere threat of similar action by the miners against government-supported pit closures had ended in humiliation for Margaret Thatcher – a humiliation omitted by the Thatcher legend and by most historians in favour of the miners’ strike she defeated, in much more favourable political circumstances, four years later.”
― Andy Beckett

“It was not Mrs Thatcher who made it possible for groups like Wham! to become rich and famous. If anything, the reverse was true. It was groups like Wham! – or more accurately their forerunners in the 1960s and 1970s, with all their talk of fighting the system, standing up to the Establishment, being who you wanted to be and living your life on your own terms – who opened the door for Mrs Thatcher. By undermining the institutions that had dominated British life for decades, by emphasizing the importance of self-gratification and by celebrating the value of the individual, Lennon and his contemporaries made it much easier for younger voters, in particular, to embrace her free-market message.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination

“It was five months since Haig had told the British War Council: ‘The machine gun is a much over-rated weapon and two per battalion is more than sufficient.’ He was once again being proved terribly wrong.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“the first and foremost step towards a victorious landing was to upset the equilibrium of the Turk so that he should be unable to concentrate either his mind or his men to meet our main attacks…. Prudence here is entirely out of place. There will be and can be no reconnaissances, no half measures, no tentatives. At a given moment we must stake everything on the one hazard.”
― Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Challenge of War, 1914-1916

“The man who makes no mistakes never makes anything”
― Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Challenge of War, 1914-1916

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration.”
― Max Hastings

“Once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success”
― Alex Ferguson, Leading: Lessons in leadership from the legendary Manchester United manager

“The trouble with people is they don't understand people.”
― David Goodis

“What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop’s proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.”
― Timothy Snyder

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation. This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president.”
― Richard Nixon

“People are delighted to accept pensions and gratuities, for which they hire out their labour or their support or their services. But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But if death threatens these same people, you will see them praying to their doctors; if they are in fear of capital punishment, you will see them prepared to spend their all to stay alive.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Narrative history fell out of fashion for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians everywhere focused on analytical approaches derived mainly from the social sciences. But a variety of recent, large-scale narrative histories have shown that it can be done without sacrificing analytical rigour or explanatory power.”
― Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

“Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
― Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

“The plans for the ground phase of Greif consisted of three parts: the seizure intact of at least two bridges across the Meuse by disguised raiding parties, the prompt reinforcement of any such coup de main by an armored commando formation; and an organized attempt to create confusion in the Allied rear areas through sabotage carried out by jeep parties clad in American uniforms.”
― Hugh M. Cole, The Ardennes - Battle of the Bulge

“With German tanks climbing behind the lone platoon and without any means of antitank defense, Solis seized some of the gasoline from the Francorchamps dump, had his men pour it out in a deep road cut, where there was no turn-out, and set it ablaze. The result was a perfect antitank barrier. The German tanks turned back to Stavelot-this was the closest that Kampfgruppe Peiper ever came to the great stores of gasoline which might have taken the 1st SS Panzer Division to the Meuse River. Solis had burned 124,000 gallons for his improvised roadblock, but this was the only part of the First Army's POL reserve lost during the entire Ardennes operation.”
― Hugh M. Cole, The Ardennes - Battle of the Bulge

“The Malmédy massacre would have repercussions reaching far wider than one might expect of a single battlefield atrocity in a long and bitter war. This "incident" undoubtedly stiffened the will of the American combatants (although a quantitative assessment of this fact is impossible); it would be featured in the war crimes trials as an outstanding example of Nazi contempt for the accepted rules of war; and it would serve a United States Senator as a stepping-stone toward a meteoric career. But the Malmédy massacre and the other murders of 17 December did not complete the list chargeable to Peiper and the troops of the 1st SS Panzer Division. By 20 December Peiper's command had murdered approximately 350 American prisoners of war and at least 100 unarmed Belgian civilians, this total derived from killings at twelve different locations along Peiper's line of march. PEIPER'S TROOPS ON THE ROAD TO MALMÉDY So far as can be determined the Peiper killings represent the only organized and directed murder of prisoners of war by either side during the Ardennes battle.136 The commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army took oath in the trials of 1946 that, acting on Hitler's orders, he issued a directive stating that the German troops should be preceded "by a wave of terror and fright and that no”
― Hugh M. Cole, The Ardennes - Battle of the Bulge

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Parlabane found the word 'pro-active' enormously useful, as it immediately exposed the speaker as an irredeemable arsehole, whatever previous impression might have been given. Once upon a time, he remembered, people and companies just did things. But that ceased to be impressive enough, and for a while they 'actively' did things. Now they 'pro-actively' did things, but it was still the same bloody things that they were doing when they just plain old did things. Meaningless wank-language.”
― Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning

“I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.”
― David Bowie

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“the struggle for victory over Hitler hinged on getting men, weapons, fuel and food from Britain and the United States to every front line. For Dönitz, whose U-boats were attempting to sever the British lifeline across the Atlantic, it was a truth that gnawed at his very being.”
― Jonathan Dimbleby, The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War

“The contemporary Matthew Paris wrote that, ‘foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of King John’. A bard sang that ‘no man may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly’. Yet this evil was catalyst for a greater good, Magna Carta.”
― Simon Jenkins, A Short History of England

“If the German armies had disintegrated like Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the winter of 1941, and the Third Reich had sued for peace, most of the soldiers and civilians who were to die in the Second World War would have lived.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“The corruption at the heart of Communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally was the inhuman methods employed to achieve them. This was as true of Lenin and Trotsky as of Stalin.”
― Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives

“At Peter’s court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918