Why Don't We Learn from History?

Loyalty is a noble quality, so long as it is not blind and does not exclude the higher loyalty to truth and decency. But the word is much abused. For "loyalty," analysed, is too often a polite word for what would be more accurately described as "a conspiracy for mutual inefficiency."

Where the two sides are too evenly matched to offer a reasonable chance of early success to either, the statesman is wise who can learn something from the psychology of strategy. It is an elementary principle of strategy that, if you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way

The history of ancient Greece showed that, in a democracy, emotion dominates reason to a greater extent than in any other political system, thus giving freer rein to the passions which sweep a state into war and prevent it getting out at any point short of the exhaustion and destruction of one or other of the opposing sides. Democracy is a system w

Seen with a sense of proportion, the smallest permanent enlargement of men's thought is a greater achievement, and ambition, than the construction of something material that crumbles, the conquest of a kingdom that collapses, or the leadership of a movement that ends in a rebound.

Many social reforms and practical improvements have been carried out in a few years which a democracy would have debated for generations. A dictator's interest and support may be won for public works, artistic activities, and archaeological explorations in which a parliamentary government would not be interested because they promise no votes.

in the eleventh-century teaching of Chang-Tsai: "If you can doubt at points where other people feel no impulse to doubt, then you are making progress."

What can the individual learn from history as a guide to living? Not what to do but what to strive for. And what to avoid in striving.

Conscription serves to precipitate war, but not to accelerate it —except in the negative sense of accelerating the growth of war-weariness and other underlying causes of defeat. Conscription precipitated war in 1914, owing to the way that the mobilisation of conscript armies disrupted national life and produced an atmosphere in which negotiation be

The germs of war find a focus in the convenient belief that "the end justifies the means." Each new generation repeats this argument while succeeding generations have had reason to say that the end their predecessors thus pursued was never justified by the fulfilment conceived. If there is one lesson that should be clear from history it i