Andrew Roberts > Quotes

“I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends . . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great

“The future is a matter of contempt for those with courage. - Napoleon Bonaparte.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".”
― Andrew Roberts

“Men can be unjust towards me, my dear Junot,’ he wrote to his faithful aide-de-camp, ‘but it suffices to be innocent; my conscience is the tribunal before which I call my conduct.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“If you would make war,' he would say to to General d'Hedouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American-Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common--and enough that separated them from everyone else--that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.”
― Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900

“His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. ‘Tragedy excites the soul,’ he later told one of his secretaries, ‘lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’24”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.” ’ Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“When you make some great mistake,’ he philosophized, ‘it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“He appealed to the pride of those he would conquer but gave them no doubt as to the consequences of resistance. ‘The French army loves and respects all peoples, especially the simple and virtuous inhabitants of the mountains,’ read a proclamation to the Tyrolese that month. ‘But should you ignore your own interests and take up arms, we shall be terrible as the fire from heaven.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Essentially a compromise between Roman and common law, the Code Napoléon consisted of a reasoned and harmonious body of laws that were to be the same across all territories administered by France, for the first time since the Emperor Justinian. The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading.38 The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society.39 Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,’ she told him, ‘and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“I have beaten the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors. I am a little tired.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Nations slaughter each other for family quarrels, cutting each other’s throats in the name of the Ruler of the Universe, knavish and greedy priests working on their imagination by means of their love of the marvellous and their fears.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,’ he once said. ‘When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.’79”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Modern Swastika: Fighting Today's anti-Semitism

“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great

“When Churchill was twenty, the British Empire covered more than one-fifth of the earth’s land surface,”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Yet in all the anxiety of these days Churchill never lost his sense of humour. When an MP asked him on 8 June to ensure that the same mistakes over reparations were not made after victory that had been made after the Great War, the Prime Minister assured him that ‘That is most fully in our minds. I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated. We shall probably make another set of mistakes.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Nothing short of military defeat demoralizes a country so totally as hyper-inflation, and the Directory,”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life

“Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which tamely surrendered were finished.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Churchill loathed Communism because of the attack it made ‘on the human spirit and human rights’, he said in July 1920. ‘My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,” he once said. “When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am—asleep.”
― Andrew Roberts, Leadership in War: Essential Lessons from Those Who Made History

“when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny