John Brunetti

“The plight of the dispossessed citizens might not have been so dire had they been allowed to transition into the labor force of the commercial estates. But the continuous run of successful foreign wars brought slaves flooding into Italy by the hundreds of thousands.”
― Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

“If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5”
― H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam

“The explanatory panel adds that because the Temple of the Tranquil Seas was “the former site of negotiating the Treaty of Nanjing, the first unequal treaty of modern China, [it] has become a symbol of the commencement of China’s modern history.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“For a man who was to exhibit such acute political sharpness later in his career, Napoleon completely misread the revolution's opening stages. 'I repeat what I have said to you,' he wrote to Joseph on July 22, a week after the fall of the Bastille, 'calm will return. In a month, there will no longer be a question of anything. So, if you send me 300 livres [7,500 francs] I will go to Paris to terminate our business.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life