Joseph Moore

“Lafayette said to Mauroy, “Don’t you believe that the people are united by the love of virtue and liberty?” Mauroy replied the Americans were not some novel species, they were simply transplanted Europeans “who brought to a savage land the views and prejudices of their respective homelands.” He proceeded to give Lafayette a brief moral history of European colonization: “Fanaticism, the insatiable desire to get rich, and misery—those are, unfortunately, the three sources from which flow that nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants who, sword in hand, go to cut down, under an alien sky, forests more ancient than the world, watering a still virgin land with the blood of its savage inhabitants, and fertilizing with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.”3 This, Mauroy informed Lafayette, was the reality of the “new world” toward which they sailed.”
― Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette and the Age of Revolution

“And from time to time, the fluctuation doesn’t produce a Big Bang, it just re-creates last Tuesday—specifically, that moment when you stubbed your toe on the kitchen table and spilled an entire cup of coffee on the floor. That moment. And every other moment of your life. And everyone else’s.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“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

“There was nothing wrong with the conclusion . . . that Germany and continental Europe west of Russia would only be able to hold their own . . . if Europe pulled together. And a united Europe would fall almost automatically under the leadership of the strongest power – Germany . . . [But] German leadership over a united Europe in order to brave the coming giant economic and political power blocs would have to overcome the imagined reluctance [sic] of Europeans to domination by any one of their peers. Germany would have to persuade Europe to accept German leadership . . . to make crystal clear that the overall interest of Europe would coincide with the enlightened self-interest of Germany . . . in order to achieve in the years after 1900 something like the position of the Federal Republic today.91”
― Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I