Quotes from Andrew Roberts

If you treat the mob with kindness,' he told Joseph later, 'these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be.

Good and upstanding people must be persuaded by gentle means,' Napoleon would later write. 'The rabble must be moved by terror.

I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends . . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.

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.

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.

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.

More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821.

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

The future is a matter of contempt for those with courage. - Napoleon Bonaparte.

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.

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

I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon

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

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.

When you make some great mistake,' he philosophized, 'it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.

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.

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.

I have beaten the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors. I am a little tired.

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

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.

When Churchill was twenty, the British Empire covered more than one-fifth of the earth's land surface

Nothing short of military defeat demoralizes a country so totally as hyper-inflation, and the Directory

There is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

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.