Dangers which are warded off and difficulties which are overcome before they reach a crisis are utterly unrecognised.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Even the hard times are part of your life story. If you acknowledge them and move past them, they eventually add up to the experience that makes you wise.

I see a lot of patterns in our behavior as a nation that parallel a lot of other historical processes.

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy.

Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.