Virginia Cowles > Quotes

“To-day, it is no exaggeration to claim that out of the eleven countries smashed and overrun by Germany, half of them were destroyed, not by tanks, but by propaganda.”
― Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble: 'One of the truly great war correspondents: magnificent.'

“The Kaiser’s friend, the Jewish intellectual Walter Rathenau, who had inherited his father’s great electrical industry, the Allgemeine Electrizitäts Gesellschaft, watched the darkening scene with desperation. The cult of nationalism was to blame; the only solution was a European Common Market. There is one possibility left [he wrote on Christmas Day 1913]: an industrial customs union, of which sooner or later, for better or for worse, the states of Western Europe would become members… Fuse the industries of Europe into one… and political interests will fuse too. This is not world peace or disarmament, nor is it general debility; but it is an alleviation of conflicts, an economy of power and the solidarity of civilization.”
― Virginia Cowles, 1913: The Defiant Swan Song

“afternoon,’ wrote an American correspondent”
― Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill: The Era and The Man

“Ouvrard could rage, Hope could enveigh, Baring could protest; but the Rothschilds had arrived.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“behaviour”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“All Rothschilds still accept the belief: ‘A family that works together is invincible.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“As early as 1817 the Prussian ambassador was reporting to Berlin that Rothschild was ‘easily the most enterprising business man in the country. He is, moreover, a man upon whom one can rely and with whom the Government here does considerable business. He is also … honest and intelligent.’[”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“in”
― Virginia Cowles, The Astors

“When before, through all the centuries of this island’s history, has such a theme matched such a pen?’ commented the Spectator.”
― Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill: The Era and The Man

“The German banker, Moritz von Bethmann, believed that the main reason for the Rothschilds’ success was ‘the harmony between the brothers’.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“of Wales’ hosts at the ball given at New”
― Virginia Cowles, The Astors

“gout”
― Virginia Cowles, The Great Swindle: A History of the South Sea Bubble

“numismatist”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“1870, even though the Hohenzollem Emperor, William II, pressed the family to establish a branch of the bank in his capital, the Rothschilds refused. As things turned out, it saved the family from large financial losses, but it was not shrewdness”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“Like Shakespeare’s shrew, she should have been beaten every day by her husband,”
― Virginia Cowles, The Astors

“So many worthless people relying on French protection are enabled to sin against me with impunity, and nobody now feels that he has any duties toward me; everybody does as he pleases and is actuated by base and selfish motives. I have thus lost more than two-thirds of a fortune that was never very considerable. That is hard, but harder than everything else is my present condition.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“to his great joy that he was the richest prince in Europe, with an inheritance in the vicinity of forty or fifty million thalers (between £8,000,000 and £10,000,000), an almost unheard of sum for the times. The Prince moved his court, his officials, his mistresses and bastards from Hanau to Cassel; and because he was short of space commissioned an Italian architect to present him with plans for a fine new palace.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds

“big dixie which contained a mixture of rum and lime and water, well calculated to dispel the ugliness of the day and turn the night into something soft and sympathetic.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Phantom Major: The Story of David Stirling and the SAS Regiment

“Banking was still in such a rudimentary state that even bankers seemed to be baffled by it.”
― Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds