Explore Quotes by John Keegan

We may have to have a geo-political regrouping or major geo-political changes.

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.

Nobody should teach anywhere for 25 years, but I did.

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.

We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff — the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow- brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

Men killing other men really is an extraordinary phenomenon. Why does it happen? And how long has it gone on? And have the motives changed?

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper.

Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

Some people are more terrorist than others

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Good men who exercise power are really the most fascinating of all people.

I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.