Home > Work > The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
41 " the thing you contend for to be reason,” Burke had said, “show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please. "
― Barbara W. Tuchman , The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
42 " If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!” lamented Samuel Coleridge. “But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.” The image is beautiful but "
43 " is more unfair,” as an English historian has well said, “than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory. "
44 " His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom. "
45 " When a pope's election could not be explained rationally, it was attributed to the Holy Ghost. "
46 " The attitude was a sense of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable. A feeling of this kind leads to ignorance of the world and of others because it suppresses curiosity. "
47 " The limitation prompting folly " was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable. "
48 " Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers. "
49 " had said, “The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire. "
50 " Hubert Humphrey advised new members, “If you feel an urge to stand up and make a speech attacking Vietnamese policy, don’t make it. "
51 " Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom. "
52 " In this atmosphere of doubt why was the extreme risk approved? Partly because exasperation at the failure of all her efforts at intimidation had led to an all-or-nothing state of mind and a helpless yielding like Bethmann’s by the civilians to the military. "
53 " virtue without power,” as a speaker had said at the Council of Basle half a century earlier, “will only be mocked, and that the Roman Pope without the patrimony of the Church would be a mere slave of Kings and princes, "
54 " Each day he grew older and learned something new.” Strong "
55 " In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design. This "
56 " government, in the words of one of the group, J. K. Galbraith, was rarely more than a choice between “the disastrous and the unpalatable. "
57 " The hypothetical has its charm, but actual government is history. "
58 " Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office],” he wrote to a friend, “a rottenness begins in his conduct. "
59 " Had I known that these legs were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better care of them when I was a lad. Duke of Grafton "
60 " Washington's incessant need for NEW assessments testifies to uncertainty in the capital. "