" Mr. MacDonald smiled. “They wouldn’t see and they wouldn’t listen,” he declared. “They never listen to people who try to tell them unpalatable truths. Lord Roberts warned them before the last war and they said he was in his dotage. Winston Churchill, Roger Keyes, Neville Henderson and half a dozen others warned them that Germany was on the warpath again, and all they did was to disarm faster and break up our battleships for scrap. . . . I don’t know whether you have noticed,” continued Mr. MacDonald, “it is rather an extraordinary thing: Churchill has never once said, ‘I told you so,’ or, ‘If you had only listened to me.’ He is a big man, there is no doubt of that. "

― D.E. Stevenson , Spring Magic