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"Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing."

Herodotus

"The only other comparable regiment [to the Paras] is the Royal Marines but they are slower. They like to think a bit - and then go and get killed. The Paras just go out and get killed."

Army historian Major Charles Heyman

"Die Neger im Senegal versichern steif und fest, die Affen seien Affen ganz wie wir, jedoch klüger, indem sie sich des Sprechens enthalten, um nicht als Mensch anerkannt und zum Arbeiten gezwungen zu werden."

"When I lost sight of my native country, I found it again in my heart."

 Heinrich Heine

 "Effective management always means asking the right questions." The Supermanagers

Robert Heller

"Groaning with hangovers, they limped in step to their station on the main parade ground, where they stood motionless in the heat for an hour or two with the men from the .. other cadet squadrons. Until enough of them had collapsed to call it a day. .. As soon as enough unconscious men had been collected in the ambulances, the medical officer signaled the bandmaster to strike up the band and end the parade... Each of the parading squadrons was graded as it marched past. The best squadron in each wing won a yellow pennant on a pole which was utterly worthless. The best squadron on the base won a red pennant on a longer pole that was worth even less, since the pole was heavier and was that much more of a nuisance to lug around all week. Like Olympic medals .. they signified that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else." Catch-22 , p. 94.

"It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage." P.554

Joseph Heller

"’And have you no fear?’ the woman said.
‘Not to die,’ he said truly.
‘But other fears?’
‘Only of not doing my duty as I should.’
‘Not of capture, as the other had?’
‘No,’ he said truly. ‘Fearing that, one would be so preoccupied as to be useless.’
‘You are a very cold boy.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am preoccupied with my work.’
‘But you do not like the things of life?’
‘Yes. Very much. But not to interfere with my work.’
‘You like to drink, I know. I have seen.’
‘Yes. Very much. But not to interfere with my work.’
‘And women?’
‘I like them very much, but I have not given them much importance.’
‘You do not care for them?’
‘Yes. But I have not found one that moved me as they say they should move you.'"

"Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practise in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol."

"Dying was nothing but he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of the hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond." For whom the bell tolls

"Speaking without thinking is shooting without aiming."

Jacule Prudentum, George Herbert

"It will be surprising if history does not point to more overestimates than underestimates [of the Soviet Bloc] ... it is more satisfying, safer professionally, and easier to live with oneself and one's colleagues as a hawk than a wimp ... Western intelligence has claimed a special responsibility to lead thinking rather than to follow it. It can hardly duck responsibility if its worst-case conclusions have been propagated and used." Addressing the US Army War College in May 1988

"There is a risk of missing real opportunities of increased security if assessments perpetuate 'worst case' stereotypes of the adversary." Addressing Royal Naval College in May 1998

Former head of Soviet Bloc 'J' Division at GCHQ, Michael Herman

This is my country. If my people came
from England here four centuries ago,
the only trace that's left is in my name.
Kilmore, Armagh, no other sod can show
the weathered stone of our first burying.
Born in Belfast, which drew the landless in,
that river-straddling, hill-rimmed town, I cling
to the inflexions of my origin.

Though creed-crazed zealots and the ignorant crowd,
long-nurtured, never checked, in ways of hate,
have made our streets a byword of offence,
this is my country, never disavowed.
When it is fouled, shall I not remonstrate?
My heritage is not their violence.

John Hewitt

"Success seems to be connected with action. Successful men keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit."

Conrad Hilton

"Armies do not exist for peace. They exist solely for triumphant exertion in war." (1930s)

"Vienna is the embodiment of incest."

"Our ultimate, unchanging goal must be the elimination of all Jews."

"Even the pain of separation gives a woman a sense of well-being."

"An alleged artist who submits rubbish must be retrained in a concentration camp."

"We shall destroy everything that remains of the world of that day of shame of 1918."

"There is nothing nicer that educating a young girl, a young girl of 18 or 20 is as malleable as wax."

 Adolf Hitler

"Covenants without swords are but words."

"When there is an atmosphere of sauve qui peut, the man who keeps his head and tries to be helpful makes himself conspicuous and therefore suspect." Agent Extraordinaire, the story of Michel Hollard p. 31.

"The rudiments of military intelligence [are] not a matter of individual prowess, producing dramatic coups, but a painstaking labour, the result of teamwork piecing together an infinite number of small facts." p. 67.

George Martelli

"Now then, men, dismiss for your meal, and let us make ready for battle. Sharpen your spears each man, look to your shields, give the horses a good feed, see that the chariots are all right - let war be the word ! This whole day is for hard fighting; for there shall be no truce, not one moment ! until night shall come and part the furious hosts. Sweat shall run over many a chest under the strap of his covering shield, many a hand shall tire in grasping the spear ! sweat shall bathe the horse's flanks as he pulls the tight car ! And if I see any one shirking the fight, and dallying beside the ships, he shall have no hope to escape the carrion dogs and vultures !"

 King Agamemnon in The Iliad, Homer

"..  a brusqueness that everywhere characterises the attitude of petty officials in shops, offices, airports and hospitals, when dealing with members of the public. Shoppers, pedestrians and drivers exist so that the favoured classes may tell them what to do. The 'insolence of office' is not in the Soviet Union a term of abuse, it is a bonus that goes with the job." p. 22.

"In Moscow people suddenly fall silent in the face of suggestions from Westerners that things are getting better; or lively amusement shot with - what? Pity, perhaps? - shows in their eyes, shaded with a trace of embarrassment. Droll perturbation among friends is bad enough, but it is the look of pain, even anger, that startles. It is .. hard to find people enthusing about the moves towards a new political dispensation, except among those responsible for peddling the new ideas. Even the beneficiaries - intellectuals, technocrats, readers - do not display enthusiasm." p. 41.

"She was the perfect embodiment of what Hamlet called 'the insolence of office', that preening, armoured, petty pride; she showed it like some high decoration, she wore it like a medal. And medals are to the point; Muscovites are fond of giving medals - they are second only to the Americans in this regard. I think this explains their love of badges. Badges, after all, are just medals you can buy - and wear without permission .. I though of those duplicitous signs sometimes displayed in English liquor shops or sub-post offices: Please do not ask for credit as a refusal may offend. They are often headed: Polite notice. In Moscow it is not the refusal, but the request, which offends." p. 59.

"Russia, which a few years ago announced it had 'solved the problems of Nationalities', did so in a way we recognise in South Africa: declare your distant ethnic homelands independent and then starve them of resources and govern them from the distant capital. In the heat of spreading nationalism it is difficult to see how the large republics, like Georgia and the Ukraine, will escape scorching." p. 64.

"The foundation stone of the Cathedral of the Dormition was laid in 1326 to celebrate the deliverance of Moscow from the Tatars, though there had probably been a church on this site well before that date. This marks the period from which Moscow dates as the capital of the Russian state, ruled by the Muscovite princes who traced their ancestry back to the emperor Augustus and hence laid claim to the title 'Tsar'." p. 73.

"The natural assumption of superiority among certain classes is expressed with a freedom which bewilders the Westerners. But surely special cadres deserve special treatment? They were born to it, they get it and they take it for granted." p. 102.

"Why do people not work? For very good reasons. If they do work they are paid in money which cannot buy much, if it buys anything. On the other hand, if they do not work there will not be the goods for them to buy. A stick, as we say, has two ends. These people here are like spectators." p. 111.

"We talk of cost accounting and economic pluralism and markets. But what we get is state control and monopolies. Yet they demand that we be efficient and independent. Look at Hungary and China. There they have inflation, yes, but they also have goods people wish to buy. We have inflation without goods. The defence factories make television sets, the sets explode. Or we make antique machines and call them tape recorders. So we pay for spurious goods with fictitious money. We talk of new processes, but these are still directed by the central State bodies, new policies directed by the same old fools. Once they talked of socialist planning. Now they talk of cost accounting. When I hear the words cost accounting, I reach for my vodka." p. 111.

"People complain about the lack of enterprise in the Soviet Union. On the contrary, there is plenty of enterprise, the trouble is that much of it is illegal." p. 116.

"A departmental head in the office of Economic Affairs .. says, ' We are pledged to extend the pluralism of state-owned and co-operative ventures in Soviet society. What is not permitted, however, under any circumstances, is that co-operatives undermine the moral, social and ideological strength of our society'."

"Viktoria, a translator, says that Stalin managed to create a generation of people who were not people, and she recalls a remark of Dostoevsky's, that it took two generations to destroy a nation. IN the Soviet Union there have been three generations since Chekhov, more than time enough to do away with the refinements of centuries. To recapture the human virtues of dignity and spirituality is almost impossible, she thinks, because there is nothing to build on, for Stalin contrived to kill not only people, he managed to kill the soil in which this civilisation once took root." p. 167.

Moscow Moscow!, Christopher Hope

"America is not training 3 000 000 troops to play tiddly winks with Germany. We will pen the German Army in a ring of steel." US Presidential Advisor, 23.06.1942

Harry Hopkins

"Think well of what you say and to whom you say it."

Epistles, Bk I, epis. 18,1,68, Horace

"There is no longer any such thing as a purely domestic policy. Open economies are interdependent, and have to be outward looking."

"It looks as if the buggers mean it." (On Argentine invasion force)

"I think it very uncivilized of you to invade British territory. You are here illegally." (to an Argentine officer)

"Take it easy, I'm an old man.." To guards during his hearing

Saddam Hussein

"In trying to copy the USA the British have ended up with the worst of both worlds. We have neither the dynamism of the US or of East Asia, nor European institutions of social cohesion and long term investment. Britain has imported the mechanisms by which risk and insecurity are increased for those least able to bear it, while retaining a financial system that combines demands for high returns with minimal acceptance of risk. With European levels of unemployment and American levels of working poor, Britain has unleashed the processes that have hollowed out American industry without any compensating dynamism."

"One of the .. important advantages of the American system, like the German, is that its federal government structure has supported regional banks and regional financial markets. The banks thus have local knowledge of their customers, their business strategies and the future viability of their businesses; they are not reduced to a series of financial ratios held on the head-office computer as they are in Britain ... The London financial institutions make their cold-blooded judgment; and it cannot be contested."

"Britain ranks poorly in terms of institutional structures that support training ... There is little political demand to invest in vocational training, because the middles class has its own inside track - public forms of education and training are seen as inferior and irrelevant compared to prestige private school and university education." The State We're In

Will Hutton

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean." Foreword

"Drops of liquid sealing wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob. Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of these suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too - all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides - made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions! Suggestions from the State." [words of the Director of Hatcheries], p.34.

"Five minutes roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed." p.90.

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." Brave New World

Aldous Huxley