Boudewijn

“At Peter’s court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“If the German armies had disintegrated like Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the winter of 1941, and the Third Reich had sued for peace, most of the soldiers and civilians who were to die in the Second World War would have lived.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“These were the kids destined to live the hardworking lives of their parents and take up their fathers' trades, the future farmers, homemakers and baby makers, if they could scoot through these few years of wild pounding hormones without getting hurt or hurting someone else. If they could keep out of jail for this short stretch, most would go on to be the spine of American society - fixing the cars, working the factories, growing the food and fighting the wars.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind