The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.
I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them! (14th February 1945)
Set we forward; let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together. So through Lud's town march,
And in the temple of the great Jupiter
Our peace we'll ratify, seal it with feasts.
Set on there! Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.
How to achieve the moral breakdown of the enemy before the war has started - that is the problem that interests me. Whoever has experienced war at the front will want to refrain from all avoidable bloodshed.
War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.
War is not at all such a difficult art as people think. . . . In reality it would seem that he is vanquished who is afraid of his adversary and the the whole secret lies in that.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.