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1 " Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have. "
― Andrew Roberts , Churchill: Walking with Destiny
2 " His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives. "
― Andrew Roberts , Napoleon: A Life
3 " Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. "
4 " If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground. "
5 " No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon "
6 " I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon "
7 " For a man who was to exhibit such acute political sharpness later in his career, Napoleon completely misread the revolution's opening stages. 'I repeat what I have said to you,' he wrote to Joseph on July 22, a week after the fall of the Bastille, 'calm will return. In a month, there will no longer be a question of anything. So, if you send me 300 livres [7,500 francs] I will go to Paris to terminate our business. "
8 " dialectical "
9 " The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s great work defining how the republic of the mind should be governed, hailed the importance of increasing the breadth of understanding, promoting excellence in scholarship, advancing student dialogue and freedom of expression and inquiry. "
― Andrew Roberts , The Modern Swastika: Fighting Today's anti-Semitism
10 " The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals. "
11 " Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer, capable of synthesizing vast amounts of material and rendering it in clear, elegant prose. "
12 " It was a measure of Napoleon’s resilience and resourcefulness – and of the confidence that he still commanded – that having returned from Russia with only 10,000 effectives from his central invading force, he was able within four months to field an army of 151,000 men for the Elbe campaign, with many more to come. "
13 " I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends . . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth. "
14 " It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation. "
15 " More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821. "
16 " Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,’ he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, ‘but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct. "
17 " One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts". "
― Andrew Roberts
18 " Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come. "
19 " Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American-Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common--and enough that separated them from everyone else--that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately. "
― Andrew Roberts , A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
20 " His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. ‘Tragedy excites the soul,’ he later told one of his secretaries, ‘lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’24 "
