Max Hastings Quotes & Sayings

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

Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy. — Max Hastings

Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things, and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to destroy, and not so long ago there was no money or work, and it seems so wrong somehow, that money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up. — Max Hastings

I would have been a disastrous soldier. — Max Hastings

Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: 'People like you', he said to me, 'are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better. — Max Hastings

Until the last day of the war, MacArthur and his staff continued to
plan for Olympic [the invasion of the Japanese home islands]. Yet nobody, with the possible exception of the general, wanted to launch the operation. A British infantryman, gazing at bloated corpses on a
Burman battlefield, vented the anger and frustration common to almost
every Allied soldier in those days, about the enemy's rejection of
reason: Ye stupid sods! Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin' state of ye! Ye wadn't listen
and yer all fookin' dead! Tojo's way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin' chah an' screwin' geeshas in yer fookin' lal paper 'ooses
an' look at ye! Ah doan't knaw! — Max Hastings

It is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them. — Max Hastings

Historically, and notably in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army's conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo "control group" changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as "the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual." The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands. Before — Max Hastings

When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I'm writing. — Max Hastings

Machiavelli observed that 'wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please'. — Max Hastings

Even after years of war, some men retained scruples about licensed
homicide. [ ... ] Lieutenant Peter Downward commanded the sniper
platoon of 13 Para. He had never himself killed a man with a rifle,
but one day he found himself peering at a German helmet just visible
at the corner of an air-raid shelter
an enemy sniper.
I had his head spot in the middle of my telescopic sight, my safety
catch was off, but I simply couldn't press the trigger. I suddenly
realised that I had a young man's life in my hands, and for the cost
of one round, about twopence, I could wipe out eighteen or nineteen
years of human life. My dithering deliberations were brought back to
earth with a bump as Kirkbride suddenly shouted: 'Go on, sir. Shoot
the bastard! He's going to fire again.' I pulled the trigger and saw
the helmet jerk back. I had obviously got him, and felt completely
drained ... What had I done? — Max Hastings

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

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

In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services - each with its own air force - pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action. Mamoru — Max Hastings

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

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

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

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

One of Beria's most cynical ruses was carried out in August 1941: NKVD agents disguised as Nazi parachutists were dropped into the Volga German autonomous region, to test the loyalty of its citizens. Villages where the new arrivals were offered shelter were liquidated wholesale; the entire region's surviving population was eventually deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. — Max Hastings

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

I'm a passionate monarchist. — Max Hastings

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

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

The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure. — Max Hastings

A Russian, the poet David Samoilov, said later, We were all expecting war. But we were not expecting that war. — Max Hastings

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time. — Max Hastings

We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness (Andre Gide, 28 July 1914) — Max Hastings

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

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

Which transcended anything they had ever known. — Max Hastings

The only redemptive feature of war is the brotherhood which it forges. — Max Hastings

As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it. — Max Hastings

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

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

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, — Max Hastings

I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal. — Max Hastings

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something. — Max Hastings

It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work. — Max Hastings

Winston Churchill wrote afterwards: 'No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning, our faculties of wonder, horror, or excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years. — Max Hastings

It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless ... It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population. — Max Hastings

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

If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter. — Max Hastings

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

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

Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. "Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there." Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for "political crimes" and came home from the Urals in 1951, an old man. Even after Valya had completed university and applied for work at a Kazan shipbuilders in the 1960s, when the manager saw that her papers showed her to be an ex-Nazi prisoner he said grimly: "Before we consider anything else, we have got to establish whether you have done damage to the state. — Max Hastings

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

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

You cannot write down how people are good; you just know it, and cannot get away from it. — Max Hastings

Dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen. — Max Hastings

A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly. — Max Hastings