Books are humanity in print.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

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.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

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.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.