Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen.

I say 'try'; if we never try, we shall never succeed.

He held me against him gently, as if I was glass - as if I could shatter and fall away from him at any moment and leave him breathless and alone once more.

To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."

Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.

It's always difficult to make predictions about the future.

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.