Jonathan > Jonathan's Quotes

“For it was axiomatic to a certain type of twentieth-century Social Democrat that a badly-equipped and therefore ineffective army was somehow less immoral than one that did its job well. It was further held that due to this deliberate oversight, an inevitably slavish dependence upon multilateral institutions would somehow take up the resultant political slack. The heavy cost of this point of view is seldom borne, either directly or immediately, by its proponents; one thinks like a sovereign nation-state, or one does not. When the wheels fall off the wagon of policy, the armed services often pay the price.”
― Robert Edwards, The Winter War: Russia's Invasion of Finland, 1939–40

“If the Germans come’, Marshal Smigly-Rydz9 had stated only a month before, in August 1939, ‘we lose our freedom. If the Russians come, we lose our souls.”
― Robert Edwards, The Winter War: Russia's Invasion of Finland, 1939–40

“What if I am? It seems to me that most men are grey.” “If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“But the matter just about resolved itself of its own accord, in a tragic and macabre way. We were still at war, and among other things Dönitz could only answer, ‘There is no longer any point in concerning yourself with submariners. Most of them are no longer with us …’.”
― Teddy Shuren, Teddy Suhren, Ace of Aces: Memoirs of a U-Boat Rebel

“a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides,”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“one should not be deterred from improving his possessions for fear lest they be taken away from him or another from opening up trade for fear of taxes;”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Frederick the Great was accustomed to say: “The older     one gets the more convinced one becomes that his Majesty     King Chance does three-quarters of the business of this     miserable universe.” Sorel”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“One of them remarked, in a flat weary voice, "The wolves will eat well this year.”
― William R. Trotter, A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940

“This leads me to ask how it came to be that Pluto is Mickey’s dog, but Mickey is not Pluto’s mouse. Something is awry in the taxonomic class of mammals in the Disney universe. I”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet

“God forgives, the Finns do not.’ This”
― Vesa Nenye, Finland at War: The Winter War 1939-40

“His addiction to millenarianism, his confidence in visions, his prophetic stridency, his hatred of art, and his mistrust of secular scholarship align him with aspects of the modern world most moderns reject: religious obscurantism, extreme fanaticism, irrational fundamentalism.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided