Top 38 Max Hastings Quotes
#1. Sir Edward Grey belongs to the class which, through heredity and tradition, expects to find a place on the magisterial bench to sit in judgement upon and above their fellow men, before they ever have any opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the tasks and trials of mankind.
Max Hastings
#2. German test pilot Ernst Canter noted in his logbook that while in 1910 he flew at a height of eighty feet, two years later he was ascending to almost 5,000.
Max Hastings
#3. All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time.
Max Hastings
#4. The only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges.
Max Hastings
#5. The immediate moment is all that exists for them; everything must serve it, no matter whether what they ruin in the process is something they will be in dire need of the next minute.
Max Hastings
#6. The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity.
Max Hastings
#7. We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.
Max Hastings
#8. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad's survival, as in that of Stalin's nation. If the city's inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given
Max Hastings
#9. When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I'm writing.
Max Hastings
#10. in intelligence as in everything else related to conflict victory is gained not by the side that makes no mistakes, but by the one that makes fewer than the other side. By
Max Hastings
#11. In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity ... in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.
Max Hastings
#12. Lots of us when we're children believe 'oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they'd know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.'
Max Hastings
#13. I've always found women more loyal, more disciplined, less neurotic, more hardworking. I just think they're perfect colleagues. Whereas, God knows, I've dealt with plenty of neurotic men.
Max Hastings
#14. Dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen.
Max Hastings
#15. It was always inevitable that if you get serious trouble in any family then everybody's inclined to look at the head of that family and see if they see any cause or reason to associate it with the head of the, head of the family, why it should be.
Max Hastings
#16. Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma.
Max Hastings
#17. Which transcended anything they had ever known.
Max Hastings
#18. People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one's going to get far in later life playing by the system.
Max Hastings
#20. You cannot write down how people are good; you just know it, and cannot get away from it.
Max Hastings
#21. I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.
Max Hastings
#22. There was no doubt that in the early and mid-eighties that many of us in broadsheet newspapers felt that we still had a responsibility to try to protect the Royal Family or if you like protect the Monarchy from the assaults of the media.
Max Hastings
#23. If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter.
Max Hastings
#24. A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.
Max Hastings
#25. Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy.
Max Hastings
#26. I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal.
Max Hastings
#27. Germany's highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies.
Max Hastings
#28. It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.
Max Hastings
#29. Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.
Max Hastings
#30. It is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.
Max Hastings
#32. A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war.
Max Hastings
#33. The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest
Max Hastings
#34. As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.
Max Hastings
#35. We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness (Andre Gide, 28 July 1914)
Max Hastings
#36. Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand.
Max Hastings
#37. Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)
Max Hastings
#38. Machiavelli observed that 'wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please'.
Max Hastings
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