Jonathan

“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

“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

“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

“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