John Keegan Quotes & Sayings

We forget today that Britain still depends for its livelihood and, indeed, its day-to-day survival, on the sea. But the Royal Navy is now pitifully small and has been reduced in size by the current Government, seeking economies to finance its social programmes. Fine while there is no threat to our security. But what use would schools and hospitals be if we could not protect our imports? — John Keegan

Some people are more terrorist than others. — John Keegan

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion. — John Keegan

Nobody should teach anywhere for 25 years, but I did. — John Keegan

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it. — John Keegan

Hitler ... lacked the [inclination] for anything more than the occasional sensational display of emotion, in particular the great set-piece speech which mesmerized the mob and left him drained of ... energy. — John Keegan

Mankind, if it is to survive, must choose its leaders by the test of their intellectuality; and, contrarily, leadership must justify itself by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis. — John Keegan

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman. — John Keegan

Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they? — John Keegan

Good men who exercise power are really the most fascinating of all people. — John Keegan

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper. — John Keegan

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand. — John Keegan

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction. — John Keegan

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force. — John Keegan

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. — John Keegan

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books. — John Keegan

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help. — John Keegan

Slavery in the modern world implies the absolute deprivation of the individual's liberty, while possession of weapons and mastery of their use are means to the individual's liberation. We do not perceive how a man may be armed and at the same time bereft of his freedom. — John Keegan

The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him to men of his time and place as the leader they want and need. — John Keegan

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West. — John Keegan

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people. — John Keegan

Men killing other men really is an extraordinary phenomenon. Why does it happen? And how long has it gone on? And have the motives changed? — John Keegan

We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff - the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow- brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now - I slaughtered those people. I murdered them. — John Keegan

Even a pacifist should admire the military virtues. — John Keegan

Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear. — John Keegan

It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War's chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. — John Keegan

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble. — John Keegan

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization. — John Keegan

For our purpose, however, what the soldiers did or did not read is irrelevant. For, if soldiers did not learn to fight their battles from reading books, neither is it likely that military historians learned to write their books from watching battles. Battles are extremely confusing; and confronted with the need to make sense of something he does not understand, even the cleverest, indeed preeminently the cleverest man, realizing his need for a language and metaphor he does not possess, will turn to look at what someone else has already made of a similar set of events as a guide for his own pen. — John Keegan

Soldiers, when committed to a task, can't compromise. It's unrelenting devotion to the standards of duty and courage, absolute loyalty to others, not letting the task go until it's been done. — John Keegan

Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle - a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues. — John Keegan

I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well. — John Keegan

The ANZACs, clinging lost and leaderless to the hillsides, began, as the hot afternoon gave way to grey drizzle, to experience their martyrdom. — John Keegan

We may have to have a geo-political regrouping or major geo-political changes. — John Keegan

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university. — John Keegan

A civilised man is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat. — John Keegan

The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence. — John Keegan

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought. — John Keegan