Strange Defeat Quotes

“No doubt they thought that by allowing themselves to become martyrs to their nerves they were giving proof of a fine stoicism, just as by living in a continual rush they produced in their own minds an illusion of activity.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“How pleasant it is', says the Roman poet, 'to listen to a storm from the safe shelter of the shore.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“For there can be no salvation where there is not some sacrifice, and no national liberty in the fullest sense unless we have ourselves worked to bring it about.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“I do not say that the past entirely governs the present, but I do maintain that we shall never satisfactorily understand the present unless we take the past into account.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“For it is an undoubted truth that unless virtue is accompanied by severe self-criticism, it always runs the risk of turning against its own most dearly held convictions.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“By concentrating attention on matters concerned with the earning of their daily bread, they ran the risk of discovering that there might be no daily bread to earn.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Men's memories are short. Such times are real only to a handful of old fogies who live out their lives among the musty tomes of ancient libraries The average human being finds in the immediate past a convenient screen to set between himself and the distant truths of history. It keeps him from realizing that the embalmed tragedies of an older day may once again become realities.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“The world belongs to those who are in love with the new.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“It is one of the privileges of the true man of action that, when the critical moment comes, blemishes of character are effaced, while virtues, till then potential merely, are seen in an unexpectedly vivid light.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Similarly, when it is not the past that we are studying, but some set of phenomena relating to a principle still active, we expect to be told whenever a new piece of evidence may emerge, in the light of which it is quite possible that the whole elaborate structure of our conclusions will have to be changed.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“A democracy becomes hopelessly weak, and the general good suffers accordingly, if its higher officials, bred up to despise it, and necessarily drawn from those very classes the dominance of which it is pledged to destroy, serve it only half-heartedly.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“The voice on the radio may speak our language, but it comes from the other side of the Rhine.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Is it to be wondered that our military staffs organized their Intelligence Services so badly? Their members belonged to a social class in which the taste for self-education was suffering from creeping paralysis. They were the kind of men who could read Mein Kampf and still entertain doubts about the true intentions of Nazi policy.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Hitler kept the truth from his servile masses. Instead of intellectual persuasion he gave them emotional suggestion.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“It was a strange form of wisdom that did not even ask whether, in fact, there could be any worse catastrophe, for our culture or for the system of our economic life, than to let ourselves be conquered by a robber society.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Girls today laugh at the swooning habits of their grandmothers. They are right to do so, and I am certain that courage in them is no less natural than in us, nor less a duty.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“A genuine alliance is something that has to be worked at all the time. It is not enough to have it set down on paper. It must draw the breath of life from a multiplicity of daily contacts which, taken together, knit the two parties solidly into a single whole.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“There can be no real co-operation without comradeship, and comradeship can be achieved only where there is some degree of daily contact.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Men are so made that they will face expected dangers in expected places a great deal more easily than the sudden appearance of deadly peril from behind a turn in the road which they have been led to suppose is perfectly safe.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Early mistakes become tragic only when the men in charge are incapable of putting them right.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“I share Pascal's view that 'it is a very strange kind of enthusiasm that is roused to fury against those who point out the errors of our public men, rather than against the men themselves...'. 'the saints,' he writes elsewhere, 'have never kept silent.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“When a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bond in honesty, I think, to attack it.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity which becomes particularly fragrant when attempts are made to apply it”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Comparez ces deux journaux quasi homonymes : The Times et Le Temps. Les intérêts, dont ils suivent, l’un et l’autre, les ordres, sont de nature semblable ; leurs publics, des deux côtés, aussi éloignés des masses populaires ; leur impartialité, également suspecte. Qui lit le premier, cependant, en saura toujours, sur le monde, tel qu’il est, infiniment plus que les abonnés du second. Même”
― Marc Bloch, L'Étrange Défaite