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Max Hastings QUOTES

Max Hastings QUOTES

1 " Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war) "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

2 " The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure. "

― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

3 " Bethmann-Hollweg era davvero irremovibile non tanto sulle sue richieste territoriali – cercò, a un certo punto, di dissuadere il Kaiser dall’insistere sull’annessione del Belgio – quanto sull’intenzione di imporre una unione doganale sul continente: «è sottinteso che l’unione doganale dovrà rendere possibile il controllo della Germania sull’Europa» "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

4 " As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

5 " In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity...in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for. "

― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

6 " The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

7 " Germany’s highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

8 " Machiavelli observed that ‘wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please’. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

9 " it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them. "

― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

10 " We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness (Andre Gide, 28 July 1914) "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

11 " Winston Churchill wrote afterwards: 'No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning, our faculties of wonder, horror, or excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

12 " The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew. "

― Max Hastings , Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

13 " Sir Edward Grey belongs to the class which, through heredity and tradition, expects to find a place on the magisterial bench to sit in judgement upon and above their fellow men, before they ever have any opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the tasks and trials of mankind. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

14 " Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: ‘People like you’, he said to me, ‘are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better. "

― Max Hastings

15 " Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that “Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend. "

― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

16 " It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless … It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

17 " Historically, and notably in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo “control group” changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as “the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.” The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands. Before "

― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

18 " All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time. "

― Max Hastings , Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

19 " On 1 November the old OSS man arrived by appointment at army headquarters, wearing uniform and carrying a .357 revolver together with $US40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon’s work overthrowing a government. "

― Max Hastings , Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

20 " The Russian armies drove forward in the same desperate fashion in which they had retreated in the previous year, numbed by daily horrors. Victory at Kursk meant little to a soldier such as Private Ivanov of the 70th Army, who wrote despairingly to his family in Irkutsk: “Death, and only death awaits me. Death is everywhere here. I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this? We are all terribly dirty, with long hair and beards, in rags. Farewell for ever.” Private Samokhvalov was in equally wretched condition: “Papa and Mama, I will describe to you my situation, which is bad. I am concussed. Very many of my unit have been killed—the senior lieutenant, the regimental commander, most of my comrades; now it must be my turn. Mama, I have not known such fear in all my eighteen years. Mama, please pray to God that I live. Mama, I read your prayer … I must admit frankly that at home I did not believe in God, but now I think of him forty times a day. I don’t know where to hide my head as I write this. Papa and Mama, farewell, I will never see you again, farewell, farewell, farewell. "

― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945