Hubris Quotes

“To Portsmouth the Russians sent Sergey Witte, generally regarded as their ablest political leader and a staunch opponent of the war, who had been the tsar’s minister of finance. It was a curious choice, in that Witte was detested by both the tsar and the tsaritsa, but it proved to be a brilliant one for Russia. Another Russian of German origin, he was considered by the imperial court to be vulgar, cynical, arrogant, boastful, and totally lacking in the modern-day quality of charisma. But on arrival in the United States he set out shamelessly to woo American public opinion, ostentatiously flattering Roosevelt.”
― Alistair Horne, Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century

“Back in another untroubled summer, that of 1870, the British foreign secretary Lord Granville, gazing up from Whitehall, could detect “not a cloud in the sky.” Yet a month later, Europe would be torn asunder by the Franco-Prussian War, marking the end of a century of Pax Britannica and all its optimistic assumptions.”
― Alistair Horne, Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century