Sublime

Marshall offered encouraging words: “With your literary ability, your general military knowledge and your comprehensive knowledge of affairs in France, coupled with your ability to reduce things to simplicities, you are better prepared to write such a book than anyone else I know in the Army.”

The development of the tank, for example, was not part of the allied war strategy at the start of World War I. However, the invention of the tank altered the allied strategy at the end of the war. The generals didn’t say, “Our strategy calls for a tank. Build us one.” No, the tank was invented by a British War Department skunk-works and presented t

I would emphasize a basic value of history to the individual. As Burckhardt said, our deeper hope from experience is that it should “make us, not shrewder (for next time), but wiser (for ever).” History teaches us personal philosophy.

All of us do foolish things—but the wiser realize what they do. The most dangerous error is failure to recognize our own tendency to error. That failure is a common affliction of authority.

Even among great scholars there is no more unhistorical fallacy than that, in order to command, you must learn to obey.

General Moshe Dayan, refused to discipline the man. “I will never punish an officer for daring too much, but only too little.”

Alexander the Great once said: ‘I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.’”