Andrew Roberts Quotes

#1. Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,' he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, 'but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct.

Andrew Roberts

#2. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.

Andrew Roberts

#3. At one dinner he [George Smith Patton] toasted his officers' wives with the words: 'My, what pretty widows you're going to make.

Andrew Roberts

#4. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.

Andrew Roberts

#5. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation.

Andrew Roberts

#6. Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.

Andrew Roberts

#7. They looked like scarecrows,' Slim said of his troops. 'But they looked like soldiers, too.' He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk.

Andrew Roberts

#8. That's war: very high in the morning and very low in the evening: from triumph to failure is only one step.

Andrew Roberts

#9. If you would make war,' he would say to to General d'Hedouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.

Andrew Roberts

#10. THE STORM OF WAR A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Andrew Roberts

#11. One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

Andrew Roberts

#12. True heroism consists of being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge to the combat.' Napoleon on board HMS Northumberland, 1815

Andrew Roberts

#13. The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.

Andrew Roberts

#14. Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August 15, 1769.

Andrew Roberts

#15. What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.

Andrew Roberts

#16. The idea of God is very useful,' Napoleon said, 'to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.

Andrew Roberts

#17. ministry of justice

Andrew Roberts

#18. Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.

Andrew Roberts

#19. For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92.

Andrew Roberts

#20. On Liberty, 'that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

Andrew Roberts

#21. I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends . . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.

Andrew Roberts

#22. His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'24

Andrew Roberts

#23. More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821.

Andrew Roberts

#24. The true conquests, the only ones that cause no regret, are those made over ignorance.'68

Andrew Roberts

#25. The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman's great work defining how the republic of the mind should be governed, hailed the importance of increasing the breadth of understanding, promoting excellence in scholarship, advancing student dialogue and freedom of expression and inquiry.

Andrew Roberts